
Class _B.L-&L4ifi 

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Ideals 

of 

Science and Faith 



Ideals 



of 



Science & Faith 



ESSAYS BY VARIOUS AUTHORS 



Edited by 
The Rev. J. E. HAND 

{Editor of "Good Citizenship") 



All rights reserved 



New York 
Longmans, Green, & Co. 

London : George Allen 

1904 



LIBRARY n* CONGRESS 

Two Codes Received 

JUN 11 1904 

CooyrUrht Entry 

CllASSy4 f XXo.No.1 

»s5T+ 1 



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/ Hot 



Copyright, IQ04, by 
Longmans, Green, and Co. 



UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CAMliRIDGE, U.S.A. 



to 

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PREFACE 

For several centuries Religion and Science have 
been much at enmity — sometimes in open warfare, 
sometimes in covert hostilities. Round these two 
great interests social alliances, temporal and spir- 
itual, have grouped themselves. Religion has re- 
ceived a wavering and intermittent support from 
Philosophy, and has enjoyed an alliance- — bickering 
yet abiding — with the Governing Classes, Military, 
Political, and Juristic. Science has been in alliance 
— always unorganised and generally unconscious — 
with Industry; from the first with the Mechanical 
Crafts, and of late increasingly with the great vital 
activities of Agriculture, Health Maintenance, and 
Education. ~ 

A new grouping is now beginning to appear. 
That the feud between Religion and Science will 
wholly disappear is perhaps more than can be hoped 
for under present circumstances; but on all sides 
is a growing recognition that the ideals common to 
both Religion and Science are not only numerous, 
but are indeed the very ideals for which the nobler 

v 



Preface 

spirits on both sides care most. Hence it is that 
men of science and theologians alike evince an in- 
creasing desire for mutual toleration, sometimes even 
for some measure of co-operation, if not positive 
alliance. That is a position from which the deepest 
and most practical minds on both sides have never 
been far removed. 

Thus at the present time not a few leaders of 
thought formerly ranged in opposing camps are 
beginning to forecast the possibilities of such new 
groupings, even to suggest co-operative campaigns 
on behalf of the ideals common to both the theo- 
logical and scientific thought of to-day. 

As a recent notable example of the approach 
toward religious problems from the side of physical 
science the Editor has to express his indebtedness 
for the permission to reprint Sir Oliver Lodge's 
papers in the Hibbert Journal. The HON. Ber- 
trand Russell's paper in this volume is reprinted 
by kind permission of the Editor of the Independent 
Review. 

The further definition of the ideals of the sciences, 
their correspondence with those of faith, their appli- 
cation to life, are the questions which the Editor of 
this volume has proposed to the remaining writers, 
whom he has invited as representatives of different 
standpoints. Each writer, of course, remains exclu- 

vi 



Preface 

sively responsible for his own contribution. Their 
answers complete the present volume of papers. 

My warmest thanks are due to each writer. The 
compilation of this collection would never have been 
attempted without the concurrence and advice of 
my friends, Professor Patrick Geddes, Mr. Victor 
V. Branford, and Rev. Ronald Bayne. 

J. E. HAND. 
St. Mary's, Bryanston Square, 

London, W. 
March 7, 1904. 



V11 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Preface v 

Introduction xi 

APPROACHES THROUGH SCIENCE 
AND EDUCATION 

A Physicist's Approach 3 

Sir Oliver Lodge, D.Sc, LL.D., F.R.S. 

Pri?icipal of the University of Birmingham 

A Biological Approach 49 

Professor J. Arthur Thomson, M.A. 
Natural History Department, University of Aberdeen 
Professor Patrick Geddes 

University Hall, Edinburgh 

A Psychological Approach 81 

Professor John H. Muirhead, M.A. 

Professor of Philosophy •, University of Birmingham 

A Sociological Approach towards Unity . . . 103 
Victor V. Branford, M.A. 

Honorary Secretary, The Sociological Society 

An Ethical Approach 157 

Hon. Bertrand Russell 

Author of" The Principles of Mathematics" etc. 
ix 



Contents 

PAGE 

An Educational Approach — A Technical Ap- 
proach 170 

Professor Patrick Geddes 

University Hall, Edinburgh 

APPROACHES THROUGH FAITH 

A Presbyterian Approach 219 

The Rev. John Kelman, M.A. 
Author of" The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson,'' 1 etc. 

A Church of England Approach 246 

The Rev. Ronald Bayne, M.A. 

Editor " Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity'' etc., 
Fifth Book 

The Church as Seen from Outside 269 

The Rev. Philip Napier Waggett, M.A. 

Author of " Science and Religion " 

A Church of Rome Approach 304 

Wilfrid Ward, B.A. 

Author of " Witnesses to the Unseen," etc. 

Index 325 



INTRODUCTION 

Of essays like the following, written from such 
widely different standpoints, and expressing the 
fullest independence of thought and treatment, the 
reader will not expect a summing-up of the essen- 
tial thoughts, much less a positive conclusion. Our 
task is mainly to introduce, in the simple and social 
sense, independent writers, who have never before 
written together, and who will not in most cases, 
until this volume appears, see how they may have 
respectively treated their subject. 

Under these circumstances both particular and 
general appreciation must be left to the reader. Yet 
the Editor may be allowed to amplify the general 
purpose of the volume, which distinguishes it from a 
mere group of magazine articles, beyond the scanty 
outline of the preface; he may make a somewhat 
fuller statement as befits one whose task has been 
to suggest a discussion, but who does not seek to 
close it. 

His general point of view is in the first place 
retrospective; it is analytical, also, of the present 
situation ; it is hopeful, too, as regards the future — 
though not professing to lift the veil. 

The Mediaeval Church was the custodian of the 
knowledge of the times, as well as of its faith: that 

xi 



Introduction 

at its best it added new gold to the treasury, minted 
it, even circulated it, has once and again been gen- 
erously recognised by the man of science ; that at its 
worst it not only hid it in a napkin, but buried it, or 
sometimes even cast it away, is frankly avowed by 
the theologian. And since tragic incident impresses 
us even more than every-day well-being, history has 
preserved many instances of the repression of knowl- 
edge, many tales of the struggle for the emancipa- 
tion of scientific thought from the limits imposed 
by the theology, or rather the theologians, of the 
times. 

The story of how secular knowledge became grad- 
ually segregated off, is from both the theologian's 
and the scientist's point of view tragic enough ; nor 
is it needful here to recall the increasing seriousness 
of opposition and of conflict, century after century. 
That much once called religion was prompted by 
good and bad motives, sometimes by preoccupation 
with the things of the spirit, by loyalty to historic 
predecessors, sometimes by timidity, bewilderment, 
jealousy, is confessed by the theologian, while the 
historian of science may also admit limitations to his 
heroes, as well as incompleteness in their thought. 

For three centuries campaign has thus been suc- 
ceeding campaign. The Cosmos is not geocentric ; 
the earth is very old ; man not only has a right but 
is bound to use his intelligence; geology does not 
square with Genesis ; the history of things shows not 
a simultaneous creation of things as they stand, but 

xii 



Introduction 

a coming and becoming of them — evolution thus 
appearing contrasted with creation. 

Man is very old, the historic period comparatively 
new; man seems a product of animal evolution; 
anthropology reveals that his social evolution also 
has been from hard struggle and humble conditions ; 
it not only seeks to describe the rise of material 
civilisation, but even the evolution of religions. 
Criticism anthropological and criticism historical 
converge upon the sacred books, and treat them 
as natural developments too. 

The observation of religious developments, from 
the common types of childhood, adolescence, matu- 
rity or age, to the rarest personalities of genius is 
beginning. There seems, in fact, no limit to the ad- 
vance of science ; while its more audacious devotees 
show now and then some tendency to ascend the 
tripod, and have even claimed in the name of science 
to erect new altars. 

What mainly have been the tactics of the theolo- 
gian, apart from mere recourse to Index or personal 
ban, — to action political rather than theological? 
Most commonly, of course, he has resisted this ad- 
vance with dialectic might and main, and thus may 
claim to have been, if not welcome to the individual 
man of science, at least useful to his fellows or suc- 
cessors, as testing his assumptions and detecting 
crudities and incompleteness. This defence has had 
its distinguished sorties, though such sharp fight- 
ing seems to have ceased for a time. Often, too, the 

xiii 



Introduction 

theologian has retired into his fastnesses, where the 
man of science could not follow him, but only stand 
outside and cry, " Mysticism — Metaphysics," or the 
like, with how much of relevancy we need not here 
investigate. What concerns us is that a few have 
made attempts towards mutual understanding. 

Is the scientific man who boasts of victory in any 
of the above-named controversies quite generous to 
the theologian whom he calls defeated? And must 
he not recognise that even what may be defeat to 
one generation may be loyally accepted by the next, 
which may even incorporate the new order so fully 
as hardly to understand the difficulties of the old ? 

If we look beyond the militant scientists, each so 
commonly a specialist fighting for his own hand, and 
ignoring all else, we see that many men of science 
have felt more or less completely that the theologian 
has still his own problems, distinct from those of 
physical and natural science. Some prefer to ignore 
these problems, are mere Gallios ; others keep abso- 
lute silence, even practically conceal the fact that 
questions assail them which their science cannot 
answer. Others, recognising the growing tendency 
of science to unity, have sought to formulate a 
scientific synthesis, and to find within its range scope 
for the feelings which have been hitherto met by 
the historic religions. Others again deny both the 
scientific and the theological synthesis. Seldom 
indeed do men of science and theology meet to 
think and talk these matters over. It is this atti- 

xiv 



Introduction 

tude which gives its character to the present volume. 
It will be easy for the critic to point out insufficient 
unity of treatment ; but that physicist and biologist, 
psychologist and educationalist, sociologist and mor- 
alist, who thus by themselves represent the main ele- 
ments for scientific synthesis, — that active members, 
too, of great religious communions, should all here 
meet, is in itself a great advance towards unity ; so 
that this small initial volume, without, of course, in 
any way claiming to be epoch-making in thought, 
may, none the less, be an epoch-marking one. The 
spirit enclosed in the covers of this book may be- 
come more consciously present in life and action. 
For when so many are not only faithfully seeking to 
see the thing as it is, but to make it what it should 
be, some progress towards the Kingdom of the Ideal 
is surely at hand. 

Without claiming or expecting too much from our 
symposium, it is something to recognise that many 
of the older causes of friction have here disappeared, 
after eras of conflict and of compromise. Not only 
is the old bitterness absent from these pages, but 
better feeling has replaced it, with correspondingly 
modest and temperate expression, with logical care 
of terminology and method, and consequent absence 
of the old bickerings over what are, after all, mere 
side-issues ; better still, we see no longer on either 
side the old misunderstanding of the distinctness of 
the respective aims of scientist and theologian. Now 
that Genesis is no longer defended as a geological 

xv 



Introduction 

primer, it is also no longer attacked as one. Later 
forms of the same confusion are also avoided, as, for 
instance, those which too long lingered in the dis- 
cussions of organic or anthropological evolution and 
which are not yet extinct upon more recent planes. 
For it must not be forgotten that our current termi- 
nology was mainly evolved during this older state of 
things. 

To remove these causes of friction is itself, then, a 
great step ; but we need more even to approach a 
true Eirenikon. No doubt each statement of the 
larger issues of each science, of the larger standpoint 
of each of the Churches, makes notably for harmony, 
since each of us is thus helped to see the other at 
his best, and to consider his main position without 
reference to the accessories or details which may too 
easily disguise this. 

This stage, therefore, we may claim the essays of 
our volume reach : indeed, rather, that this is their 
very starting-point. Narrow have been the limits 
of space necessarily imposed on each writer, yet 
they express much of the characteristic attitude and 
aims of the cultivators of the great fields of science, 
of the thoughtful adherents and exponents of great 
historic divisions of the religious world ; the general 
impression from reading them will help us to realise 
what is the aim of science, and what is the aim of 
theology, indeed of religion. 

Science is not merely observing the actual world 
of phenomena, but is organising an ever-increasing 

xvi 



Introduction 

yet ever-unifying body of interpretative conceptual 
formulae ; and these have real and vital relations 
to life as a whole, knowledge leading to foresight, 
and foresight to more organised action, educational, 
social, moral, no less than physical, industrial, or 
hygienic. This the theologian not only generally 
admits but increasingly realises. He in turn may 
ask the man of science: may not theology in its 
turn become more intelligible to you as a system of 
transcendental formulae, which has long practically 
helped to unify life, which does still thus help many, 
and which therefore, no doubt, in fuller and fuller 
correlation with the formulations of science, may 
thus aid again? Our thought has no doubt at times 
been fixed, and even arrested ; but you yourselves 
have helped us to recognise that its past is one of 
evolution; well, what if it be now beginning to 
evolve again? Are you evolutionists if you deny us 
a future? On what grounds can you assume our 
mere disappearance? May not, must not our atti- 
tudes, scientific and theological, be in some way 
complementary rather than opposed? 

In these pages we see the man of science stating 
anew the world-old problems of the religions, the 
religions, too, regarding their quondam assailant with 
sympathetic appreciation, not hostility. Has not the 
attitude of contemporary science been largely ex- 
pressed by one of its most active workers in the 
notable saying that " science is now indeed con- 
ceived, but not yet born"? And is not the theo- 
b xvii 



Introduction 

logian, even he who attaches most significance to his 
historic concept of the Church, also admitting, or 
rather more and more fully realising, that the Church 
in its ideal and triumphant sense is but unborn? 

A recent writer, 1 has insisted freshly on the need of 
clearer distinction, yet ever-renewing unity between 
the elemental sense of things from the standpoint of 
observational science, and their widest significance ; 
that is, their fullest denotations and connotations, 
from the highest standpoint of our mental, moral, 
social, religious evolution. It is from the former ele- 
mental and inductive standpoint that the scientist 
finds his start-point and refuge, but from the latter 
the theologian. Yet at these two extremes neither 
can remain : each must progress to meet the other ; 
each, too, must act in life, must organise action. 
Hence their " meaning," their intention may often 
clash, may often be divergent, perhaps still more 
often seem so. Yet is not the mutual translation 
of the many languages of the sciences, the common 
translation, too, of the many idioms of the different 
schools of theology, now becoming possible? And 
this even to plain and busy men? Must not all 
these complete one another, — nor any longer de- 
sire the exclusion of any? Let the religious be- 
come scientific, and the scientific religious; then 
there may be peace. But the only true peace is 
active peace, constructive peace. The elemental 
scientific thought and action are evidently, as these 
1 V. Welby, What is Meaning? Macmillan, 1902. 
xviii 



Introduction 

pages show, not only growing inductively, but 
grasping deductively, feeling, idealising. And so 
conversely for the theologian's transcendental view. 
Since the man of science has learned and taught 
much of unsuspected unity amid the variety of 
Nature, so may not the theologian also learn more 
and more of unity amid the many aspects of the 
Ideal? and so even come to teach anew? And 
since this increasing knowledge of the phenomenal 
order has already yielded such new arts, transform- 
ing material life, and thence reacting both for good 
and evil upon the intellectual and moral life also, 
upon the social and the religious, may not, must 
not the transcendental idealist again not only rein- 
terpret, but reorganise and reconstruct? As the 
science of each historic period has grown towards 
a synthesis, a philosophy, so the arts of each period 
have correspondingly gained their unification from 
religion, their highest expression in cult. What 
theologian, then, observing this vast modern devel- 
opment of arts and sciences, need fail to see in these 
the preparation of new resources, not only for the 
new Academy, the new Republic, but for the new 
Cathedral also; nor fear to see, upon that nobler 
Athens, towards which arts and sciences are con- 
verging, the descent of a yet nobler City of the 
Ideal, a New Jerusalem indeed? 



xix 



APPROACHES THROUGH SCIENCE 
AND EDUCATION 



A PHYSICIST'S APPROACH 

SIR OLIVER LODGE, D.Sc, LL.D., F.R.S. 
Principal of the University of Birmingham 

THE OUTSTANDING CONTROVERSY 



IT is widely recognised at the present day that the 
modern spirit of scientific inquiry has in the main 
exerted a wholesome influence upon Theology, clear- 
ing it of much encumbrance of doubtful doctrine, 
freeing it from slavery to the literal accuracy of his- 
torical records, and reducing the region of the mirac- 
ulous or the incredible, with which it used to be 
almost conterminous, to a comparatively small area. 

Benefit is likely to continue as true science ad- 
vances, but it by no means follows that the nature of 
the benefit will always be that of a clearing and unload- 
ing process. There must always come a time when 
such a process has gone far enough, and when some 
positive contribution may be expected. Whether 
such a time has now arrived or not is clearly open to 
question, but I think it will be admitted that orthodox 
science at present, though it shows some sign of ab- 
staining from virulent criticism, is still a long way from 
itself constituting any support of religious creeds; 

3 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

nor are its followers ready to admit that they have as 
yet gone too far, perhaps not even far enough, in the 
negative direction. No doubt it must be admitted 
by both sides that the highest Science and the truest 
Theology must ultimately be mutually consistent, and 
may be actually one ; but that is far from the case at 
present. The term "Theology," as ordinarily used, 
necessarily signifies nothing ultimate or divine; it 
signifies only the present state of human knowledge 
on theological subjects; and similarly the term 
" Science," if similarly employed, represents no fetish 
to be blindly worshipped as absolute truth, but merely 
the present state of human knowledge on subjects 
within its grasp, together with the practical con- 
sequences deducible from such knowledge in the 
opinion of the average scientific man : it means what 
may be called, briefly, orthodox science, the orthodox 
science of the present day, as set forth by its pro- 
fessed exponents, and as indicated by the general 
atmosphere or setting in which facts in every branch 
of knowledge are now regarded by cultivated men. 

It may be objected that there is no definite body 
of doctrine which can be called orthodox science; 
and it is true that there is no formulated creed ; but 
I suggest that there is more nearly an orthodox 
science than there is an orthodox theology. Pro- 
fessors of theology differ among themselves in a 
somewhat conspicuous manner; and even in the 
branch of it with which alone most Englishmen are 
familiar, viz., Christian Theology, there are differences 
of opinion on apparently important issues, as is evi- 
denced by the existence of Sects, ranging from Uni- 

4 



A Physicist's Approach 

tarians on the one side, to Greek and Roman Catholics 
on the other. In science, sectarianism is less marked, 
controversies rage chiefly round matters of detail, and 
on all important issues its professors are agreed. This 
general consensus of opinion on the part of experts, 
a general consensus which the public are willing 
enough to acquiesce in, and adopt as far as they can 
understand, is what I mean by the term " science as 
now understood," or, for brevity, " modern science." 

Similarly, by religious doctrine we shall mean the 
general consensus of theologians so far as they are 
in agreement, especially perhaps the general con- 
sensus of Christian theologians; eliminating as far 
as possible the presumably minor points on which 
they differ, and eliminating also everything manifestly 
below the level of dogma generally accepted at the 
present day. 

Now it must, I think, be admitted that the modern 
scientific atmosphere, in spite of much that is whole- 
some and nutritious, exercises some sort of blighting 
influence upon religious ardour, and that the great 
saints or seers have as a rule not been eminent for 
their acquaintance with exact scientific knowledge, 
but, on the contrary, have felt a distrust and a dislike 
of that uncompromising quest for cold hard truth in 
which the leaders of science are engaged ; and on the 
other hand, that the leaders of science have shown an 
aloofness from, if not a hostility for, the theoretical 
aspects of religion. In fact, it may be held that the 
general drift or atmosphere of modern science is 
adverse to the highest religious emotion, because 
hostile to many of the doctrines and beliefs upon 

5 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

which such an exalted state of feeling must be based, 
if it is to be anything more than a wave of transient 
enthusiasm. 

Nevertheless, we must admit that there have been 
men of science, there must be many now living, who 
accept fully the facts and implications of science, who 
accept also the creeds of the Church, and who do not 
keep the two sets of ideas in water-tight compartments 
of their minds, but do distinctly perceive a reconciling 
and fusing element. 

If we proceed to ask what is this reconciling 
element, we find that it is neither science nor theol- 
ogy, but that it is philosophy, or else it is poetry. 
By aid of philosophy, or by aid of poetry, a great 
deal can be accomplished. Mind and matter may 
be then no longer two, but one; this material uni- 
verse may then become the living garment of God ; 
gross matter may be regarded as a mere inference, 
a mode of apprehending an idealistic cosmic reality, 
in which we live and move and have our being ; the 
whole of existence can become infused and suffused 
with immanent Deity. 

No reconciliation would then be necessary between 
the spiritual and the material, between the laws of 
Nature and the will of God, because the two would 
be but aspects of one all-comprehensive pantheistic 
entity. 

All this may possibly be in some sort true, but it 
is not science as now understood. It is no more 
science than are the creeds of the Churches. It is 
a guess, an intuition, — an inspiration perhaps, — but 
it is not a link in a chain of assured and reasoned 

6 



A Physicist's Approach 

knowledge ; it can no more be clearly formulated in 
words, or clearly apprehended in thought, than can 
any of the high and lofty conceptions of religion. It 
is, in fact, far more akin to religion than to science. 
It is no solution of the knotty entanglement, but a 
soaring above it; it is a reconciliation in excelsis. 

Minds which can habitually rise to it are, ipso facto y 
essentially religious, and are exercising their religious 
functions ; they have flown off the dull earth of exact 
knowledge into an atmosphere of faith. 

But if this flight be possible, especially if it be ever 
possible to minds engaged in a daily round of scien- 
tific teaching and investigation, how can it be said 
that the atmosphere of modern science and the atmos- 
phere of religious faith are incompatible? Wherein 
lies the incompatibility? 

My reply briefly is — and this is the kernel of what 
I have to say — that orthodox modern science shows 
us a self-contained and self-sufficient universe, not in 
touch with anything beyond or above itself, — the 
general trend and outline of it known ; — nothing 
supernatural or miraculous, no intervention of beings 
other than ourselves, being conceived possible. 

While religion, on the other hand, requires us con- 
stantly and consciously to be in touch, even affection- 
ately in touch, with a power, a mind, a being or beings, 
entirely out of our sphere, entirely beyond our scien- 
tific ken ; the universe contemplated by religion is by 
no means self-contained or self-sufficient, it is depend- 
ent for its origin and maintenance, as we for our daily 
bread and future hopes, upon the power and the good- 
will of a being or beings of which science has no 

7 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

knowledge. Science does not indeed always or con- 
sistently deny the existence of such transcendent 
beings, nor does it make any effectual attempt to 
limit their potential powers, but it definitely disbe- 
lieves in their exerting any actual influence on the 
progress of events, or in their producing or modify- 
ing the simplest physical phenomenon. 

For instance, it is now considered unscientific to 
pray for rain, and Professor Tyndall went so far as 
to say : — 

"The principle [of the conservation of energy] 
teaches us that the Italian wind, gliding over the 
crest of the Matterhorn, is as firmly ruled as the earth 
in its orbital revolution round the sun ; and that the 
fall of its vapour into clouds is exactly as much a 
matter of necessity as the return of the seasons. The 
dispersion, therefore, of the slightest mist by the 
special volition of the Eternal, would be as much a 
miracle as the rolling of the Rhone over the Grimsel 
precipices, down the valley of Hash to Meyringen 
and Brientz. . . . 

" Without the disturbance of a natural law, quite as 
serious as the stoppage of an eclipse, or the rolling 
of the river Niagara up the Falls, no act of humilia- 
tion, individual or national, could call one shower 
from heaven, or deflect towards us a single beam of 
the sun." 1 

Certain objections may be made to this statement 
of Professor Tyndall's, even from the strictly scientific 
point of view : the law of the conservation of energy 

1 From "Fragments of Science," Prayer and Natural Law* 

8 



A Physicist's Approach 

is needlessly dragged in when it has nothing really 
to do with it. We ourselves, for instance, though we 
have no power, nor hint of any power, to override 
the conservation of energy, are yet readily able, by 
a simple physical experiment, or by an engineering 
operation, to deflect a ray of light, or to dissipate a 
mist, or divert a wind, or pump water uphill; and 
further objections may be made to the form of the 
statement, notably to the word " therefore " as used to 
connect propositions entirely different in their terms. 
But the meaning is quite plain nevertheless, and the 
assertion is that any act, however simple, if achieved 
by special volition of the Eternal, would be a miracle ; 
and the implied dogma is that the special volition of 
the Eternal can, or at any rate does, accomplish 
nothing whatever in the physical world. And this 
dogma, although not really a deduction from any of 
the known principles of physical science, and possi- 
bly open to objection as a petitio principii, may never- 
theless be taken as a somewhat exuberant statement 
of the generally accepted inductive teaching of ortho- 
dox science on the subject. 

It ought, however, to be admitted at once by 
Natural Philosophers that the unscientific character 
of prayer for rain depends really not upon its con- 
flict with any known physical law, since it need in- 
volve no greater interference with the order of nature 
than is implied in a request to a gardener to water 
the garden — it does not really depend upon the im- 
possibility of causing rain to fall when otherwise it 
might not — but upon the disbelief of science in any 
power who can and will attend and act. To prove 

9 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

this, let us bethink ourselves that it is not an incon- 
ceivable possibility that at some future date mankind 
may acquire some control over the weather, and be 
able to influence it ; not merely in an indirect man- 
ner, as at present they can affect climate, by felling 
forests or flooding deserts, but in some more direct 
fashion ; in that case prayers for rain would begin 
again, only the petitions would be addressed, not to 
heaven, but to the Meteorological Office. We do 
not at present ask the secretary of that government 
department to improve our seasons, simply because 
we do not think that he knows how ; if we thought 
he did, we should have no hesitation, on the score 
of his possible non-existence, or a doubt lest our 
letter should never reach him. Professor Tyndall's 
dogma, will, if pressed, be found to embody one of 
these last alternatives, although superficially it pre- 
tends to make the somewhat grotesque suggestion 
that the alteration requested is so complicated and 
involved, that really, with the best intentions in the 
world, the Deity does not know how to do it. 

No doubt the line of piety might be taken, that 
the central Office knew best what it was about, and 
that petitions were only worrying ; but that would be 
rather a supine and fatalistic attitude if we were in 
real distress, and certainly, on a higher level, it would 
be a very unfilial one. Religious people have been 
told, on what they generally take to be good au- 
thority, that prayer might be a miraculously power- 
ful engine for achievement, even in the physical 
world, if they would only believe with sufficient 
vigour ; but (I am not here questioning the sound- 

10 



A Physicist's Approach 

ness of their position) they have dramatised or spirit- 
ualised away the statement, and act upon it no more. 
Influenced it is to be presumed by science, they have 
come definitely to disbelieve in physical interference 
of any kind whatever on the part of another order 
of beings, whether more exalted or more depraved 
than ourselves, although such beings are frequently 
mentioned in their sacred books. 

Whatever they might be able to do if they chose, 
for all practical purposes such beings are to the aver- 
age scientific man purely imaginary, and he feels 
sure that we can never have experiential knowledge 
of them or their powers. In his view the universe 
lies before us for investigation, and we perceive that 
it is complete without them ; it is subject to our own 
partial control if we are willing patiently to learn how 
to exercise it, but to no other control does it make 
any pretence of obedience. Even in the most vital 
concerns of life, it is the doctor, not the priest, who 
is summoned: a pestilence is no longer attributed 
to divine jealousy, nor would the threshing-floor of 
Araunah be used to stay it. 

Nor is the terminology of the two subjects com- 
mensurate. The death of an archbishop can be 
stated scientifically in terms not very different from 
those appropriate to the stoppage of a clock, or the 
extinction of a fire; but the religious formula for 
the same event is that it has pleased God in His infi- 
nite wisdom to take to Himself the soul of our dear 
brother, etc. The very words of such a statement 
are to modern science unmeaning. (In saying this, 
I trust to be understood as not now in the slightest 

ii 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

degree attempting to judge the question which form 
is the more appropriate.) 

Religion may, in fact, be called supernatural or 
superscientific, if the term " natural " be limited to 
that region of which we now believe that we have 
any direct scientific knowledge. 

In disposition also they are opposite. Science 
aims at a vigorous adult, intelligent, serpent-like 
wisdom, and active interference with the course of 
nature ; religion aims at a meek, receptive, child- 
hearted attitude of dovelike resignation to the Divine 
will. 

Take a scientific man who is not something more 
than a scientific man, one who is not a poet, or a 
philosopher, or a saint, and place him in the atmos- 
phere habitual to the churches, — and he must starve. 
He requires solid food, and he finds himself in air. 
He requires something to touch and define and 
know ; but there everything is ethereal, indefinable, 
illimitable, incomprehensible, beautiful, and vague. 
He dies of inanition. 

Take a religious man, who has not a multitude of 
other aptitudes overlaid upon his religion, into the 
cold dry workings, the gropings and tunnellings of 
science, where everything must be scrutinised and 
proved, distinctly conceived and precisely formulated, 
— and he cannot breathe. He requires air and free 
space, whereas he finds himself underground, among 
foundations and masonry, very solid and substantial, 
but very cabined and confined. He dies of asphyxia. 

If a man be able to live in both regions, to be 
amphibious as it were, able to take short flights 

12 



A Physicist's Approach 

occasionally, and able to burrow underground occa* 
sionally, accepting the solid work of science and be- 
lieving its truth, realising the aerial structures of 
religion, and perceiving their beauty, will such a man 
be as happily and powerfully and freely at home in 
the air as if he had no earth adhering to his wings? 
Is the modern man as happily and powerfully and 
freely religious as he might have been with less in- 
formation? Or, I would add parenthetically, as he 
may yet perhaps again be with more? 



II 

Leaving the general, and coming to details, let us 
look at a few of the simpler religious doctrines, such 
as are still, I suppose, popularly held in this country. 
The creed of the ancient Israelites was well, or at 
least strikingly, summarised by Mr. Huxley in one 
of his Nineteenth Century articles (March 1886). He 
there says: "The chief articles of the theological 
creed of the old Israelites, which are made known to 
us by the direct evidence of the ancient records, . . . 
are as remarkable for that which they contain as for 
that which is absent from them. They reveal a firm 
conviction that, when death takes place, a something 
termed a soul, or spirit, leaves the body and continues 
to exist in Sheol for a period of indefinite duration, 
even though there is no proof of any belief in abso- 
lute immortality ; that such spirits can return to earth 
to possess and inspire the living; that they are in 
appearance and in disposition likenesses of the men 

13 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

to whom they belonged, but that, as spirits, they 
have larger powers and are freer from physical limita- 
tions ; that they thus form one of a number of kinds 
of spiritual existence known as Elohim, of whom 
Jahveh, the national God of Israel, is one ; that, con- 
sistently with this view, Jahveh was conceived as a 
sort of spirit, human in aspect and in sense, and with 
many human passions, but with immensely greater in- 
telligence and power than any other Elohim, whether 
human or divine." 

The mere calm statement of so preposterous a 
creed is plainly held by Mr. Huxley to be a suffi- 
cient refutation. 

But we need not limit ourselves to the Old Testa- 
ment, where doubtless some supposed facts may be 
abandoned without detriment, as belonging to the 
legendary or the obscure ; we may be constrained by 
science to go further, and to admit that even funda- 
mental Christian doctrines, such as the Incarnation 
or non-natural birth, and the Resurrection or non- 
natural disappearance of the body from the tomb, 
have, from the scientific point of view, no reasonable 
likelihood or possibility whatever. It may be, and 
often has been, asserted that they appear as childish 
fancies, appropriate to the infancy of civilisation and 
a pre-scientific credulous age ; readily intelligible to 
the historian and student of folk-lore, but not other- 
wise interesting. The same has been said of every 
variety of miracle, and not merely of such dogmas 
as the fall of man from an original state of perfection, 
of the comparatively recent extirpation of the human 
race down to a single family, and so on. 

14 



A Physicist's Approach 

The whole historical record, wherever it exceeds 
the commonplace, every act attributed directly to the 
Deity, whether it be sending fire from heaven, or 
writing upon stone, or leadings by cloud and fire, or 
conversations, whether during trance or otherwise, is 
utterly contrary to the spirit of modern science (let it 
be clearly remembered how I have defined the phrase 
" modern science " above) ; and when considered pro- 
saically, much of the record is summarily discredited, 
even I think by many theologians now. Nor is this 
acquiescence in negation confined to the leaders. 
The general religious world has agreed apparently to 
throw overboard Jonah and the whale, Joshua and the 
sun, the three Children and the fiery furnace ; it does 
not seem to take anything in the book of Judges or 
the book of Daniel very seriously; and though it still 
clings pathetically to the book of Genesis, it is willing 
to relegate to poetry, i.e. to imagination or fiction, 
such legends as the creation of the world, Adam and 
his rib, Eve and the apple, Noah and his ark, language 
and the tower of Babel, Elijah and the chariot of fire, 
and many others. The stock reconciling phrase, with 
regard to the legend of a six-days' creation, or the 
Levitican mistakes in Natural History, after the 
strained " day-period " mode of interpretation had 
been exploded in " Essays and Reviews," used to be, 
that the Bible was never meant to teach science ; and 
so, whenever it touches upon any branch of natural 
knowledge, it is to be interpreted in a friendly spirit, 
i.e. it is to be glossed over, and in point of fact dis- 
believed. But a book which deals with so prodigious 
a subject as the origin of all things, and the history 

IS 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

of the human race, cannot avoid a treatment of natu- 
ral facts which is really a teaching of science, whether 
such teaching is meant or not; and indeed the whole 
idea involved in the word " meant " is repugnant to 
the conceptions of modern science, which has ousted 
teleology from its arena. 

Moreover, if religious people go as far as this, where 
are they to stop? What, then, do they propose to 
do with the turning of water into wine, the ejection of 
devils, the cursing of the fig-tree, the feeding of five 
thousand, the raising of Lazarus? Or, to go deeper 
still, what do they make of the scene at the Baptism, 
of the Transfiguration, of the signs at the Crucifixion, 
the appearances after Death, the Ascension into 
heaven ? May it not be supposed that neither ortho- 
dox religion nor orthodox science has said its last 
word on these questions? 

But it may be urged that even these are but details 
compared with the one transcendent doctrine of the 
existence of an omnipotent and omniscient benevo- 
lent personal God ; the fundamental tenet of nearly 
all religions. But so far as science has anything to 
say on this subject, and it has not very much, its 
tendency is to throw mistrust, not upon the existence 
of Deity itself, but upon any adjectives applied to the 
Deity. " Infinite " and " eternal " may pass, and 
" omnipotent" and " omniscient" may reluctantly be 
permitted to go with them, — these infinite adjectives 
relieve the mind, without expressing more than is 
implicitly contained in the substantive God. But 
concerning " personal" and " benevolent" and other 
anthropomorphic adjectives, science is exceedingly 

16 



A Physicist's Approach 

dubious ; nor is omnipotence itself very easily recon- 
cilable with the actual condition of things as we now 
experience them. The present state of the world is 
very far short of perfection. Why are things still im- 
perfect if controlled by a benevolent omnipotence? 
Why, indeed, does evil or pain at all exist? All very 
ancient puzzles these, but still alive ; and the solution 
to them so far attempted by science lies in the word 
Evolution, a word in itself not readily applicable to 
the work of a God. 

Taught by science, we learn that there has been no 
fall of man, there has been a rise. Through an ape- 
like ancestry, back through a tadpole and fishlike 
ancestry, away to the early beginnings of life, the 
origin of man is being traced by science. There was 
no specific creation of the world such as was con- 
ceived appropriate to a geocentric conception of the 
universe ; the world is a condensation of primeval gas, 
a congeries of stones and meteors fallen together ; 
still falling together, indeed, in a larger neighbouring 
mass (the Sun). By the energy of the still persistent 
falling together, the ether near us is kept constantly 
agitated, and to the energy of this ethereal agitation 
all the manifold activity of our planet is due. The 
whole system has evolved itself from mere moving 
matter in accordance with the law of gravitation, and 
there is no certain sign of either beginning or end. 
Solar systems can by collision or otherwise resolve 
themselves into nebulae, and nebulae left to themselves 
can condense into solar systems, — everywhere in the 
spaces around us we see a part of the process going 
on; the formation of solar systems from whirling 

z 17 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

nebulae lies before our eyes, if not in the visible sky 
itself, yet in the magnified photographs taken of that 
sky. Even though the whole process of evolution is 
not completely understood as yet, does anyone doubt 
that it will become more thoroughly understood in 
time? and if they do doubt it, would they hope 
effectively to bolster up religion by such a doubt? 
It is difficult to resist yielding to the bent and trend 
of " modern science," as well as to its proved con- 
clusions. Its bent and trend may have been wrongly 
estimated by its present disciples : a large tract of 
knowledge may have been omitted from its ken, 
which when included will revolutionise some of their 
speculative opinions ; but, however this may be, there 
can be no doubt about the tendency of orthodox 
science at the present time. It suggests to us that 
the Cosmos is self-explanatory, self-contained, and 
self-maintaining. From everlasting to everlasting the 
material universe rolls on, evolving worlds and disin- 
tegrating them, evolving vegetable beauty and de- 
stroying it, evolving intelligent animal life, developing 
that into a self-conscious human race, and then plung- 
ing it once more into annihilation. 

" Thou makest thine appeal to me ! 
I bring to life, I bring to death, 
The spirit does but mean the breath, 
I know no more. ..." 

But at this point the theologian happily and eagerly 
interposes, with a crucial inquiry of science about 
this same bringing to life. Granted that the blaze of 
the sun accounts for winds and waves, and hail, and 

18 



A Physicist's Approach 

rain, and rivers, and all the myriad activities of the 
earth, does it account for life? Has it accounted for 
the life of the lowest animal, the tiniest plant, the 
simplest cell, hardly visible but self-moving, in the 
field of a microscope? 

And science, in chagrin, has to confess that hitherto 
in this direction it has failed. It has not yet witnessed 
the origin of the smallest trace of life from dead 
matter : all life, so far as has been watched, proceeds 
from antecedent life. Given the life of a single cell, 
science would esteem itself competent ultimately to 
trace its evolution into all the myriad existences of 
plant and animal and man ; but the origin of proto- 
plasmic activity itself as yet eludes it. But will the 
Theologian triumph in the admission? will he therein 
detect at last the dam which shall stem the torrent of 
scepticism? will he base an argument for the direct 
action of the Deity in mundane affairs on that failure, 
and entrench himself behind that present incompe- 
tence of labouring men? If so, he takes his stand on 
what may prove a yielding foundation. The present 
powerlessness of science to explain or originate life is 
a convenient weapon wherewith to fell a pseudo-scien- 
tific antagonist who is dogmatising too loudly out of 
bounds ; but it is not perfectly secure as a permanent 
support. In an early stage of civilisation it may have 
been supposed that flame only proceeded from ante- 
cedent flame, but the tinder-box and the lucifer-match 
were invented nevertheless. Theologians have prob- 
ably learnt by this time that their central tenets should 
not depend, even partially, upon nescience, or upon ne- 
gations of any kind, lest the placid progress of posi- 

19 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

tive knowledge should once more undermine their 
position, and another discovery have to be scouted 
with alarmed and violent anathemas. 

Any year, or any century, the physical aspect 
of the nature of life may become more intelli- 
gible, and may perhaps resolve itself into an action 
of already known forces acting on the very com- 
plex molecule of protoplasm. Already in Germany 
have inorganic and artificial substances been found 
to crawl about on glass slides under the action 
of surface-tension or capillarity, with an appearance 
which is said to have deceived even a biologist into 
hastily pronouncing them living amoebae. Life in 
its ultimate element and on its material side is such 
a simple thing, it is but a slight extension of 
known chemical and physical forces ; the cell must be 
able to respond to stimuli, to assimilate outside ma- 
terials, and to subdivide. I apprehend that there is 
not a biologist but believes (perhaps quite errone- 
ously) that sooner or later the discovery will be made, 
and that a cell having all the essential functions of 
life will be constructed out of inorganic material. 
Seventy years ago organic chemistry was the chemis- 
try of vital products, of compounds that could not be 
made artificially by man. Now there is no such 
chemistry ; the name persists, but its meaning has 
changed. 

It may be conceivably argued that after all we are 
alive, and that if we ever learn how to make animals 
or plants, they will take their origin from life, just as 
when we make new species by artificial selection we 
exercise a control over the forces of nature which in 

20 



A Physicist's Approach 

some small way may be akin to the methods of the 
divine control. And this may possibly be a theme 
capable of enlargement. 

But meanwhile what do we mean by such a phrase 
as divine control? for, after all, the controversy be- 
tween religion and science is not so much a contro- 
versy as to the being or not being of a God. Science 
might be willing to concede this as a vague and in- 
effective hypothesis, but there would still remain a 
question as to His mode of action, a controversy as 
to the method of the divine government of the world. 

And this is the standing controversy, by no means 
really dead at the present day. Is the world controlled 
by a living Person, accessible to prayer, influenced by 
love, able and willing to foresee, to intervene, to guide, 
and wistfully to lead without compulsion spirits in 
some sort akin to Himself? 

Or is the world a self-generated, self-controlling 
machine, complete and fully organised for movement, 
either up or down, for progress or degeneration, ac- 
cording to the chances of heredity and the influence 
of environment? Has the world, as it were, secreted 
or arrived at life and mind and consciousness by the 
play of natural forces acting on the complexities of 
highly developed molecular aggregates ; at first life- 
cells, ultimately brain-cells ; and these not the organ 
or instrument, but the very reality and essence of life 
and of mind? 

If there be any other orders of conscious existence 
in the universe, as probably there are, are they also 
locked up on their several planets, without the power 
of communicating or helping or informing, and all 

21 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

working out their own destiny in permanent iso- 
lation? Everything in such a world would be not 
only apparently but really a definite sequence of 
cause and effect, just as it seems to us here; and 
prayer, to be effectual in such a world, must be not 
what theologians mean by prayer, but must be either 
simple meditation for acquiescence in the inevitable, 
or else a petition addressed to some other of the 
dwellers in our time and place, that they may be 
induced by benevolent acts to ease some of the bur- 
dens to which their petitioners are liable. 

We thus return to our original thesis, that the root 
question or outstanding controversy between science 
and faith rests upon two distinct conceptions of the 
universe : — the one, that of a self-contained and self- 
sufficient universe, with no outlook into or links with 
anything beyond, uninfluenced by any life or mind 
except such as is connected with a visible and tan- 
gible material body ; and the other conception, that 
of a universe lying open to all manner of spiritual 
influences, permeated through and through with a 
Divine spirit, guided and watched by living minds, 
acting through the medium of law indeed, but with 
intelligence and love behind the law: a universe by 
no means self-sufficient or self-contained, but with 
feelers at every pore groping into another super- 
sensuous order of existence, where reign laws hith- 
erto unimagined by science, but laws as real and as 
mighty as those by which the material universe is 
governed. 

According to the one conception, faith is childish 
and prayer absurd ; the only individual immortality 

22 



A Physicist's Approach 

lies in the memory of descendants ; kind actions and 
cheerful acquiescence in fate are the highest religious 
attributes possible ; and the future of the human race 
is determined by the law of gravitation and the cir- 
cumstances of space. 

According to the other conception, prayer may be 
mighty to the removal of mountains, and by faith we 
may feel ourselves citizens of an eternal and glorious 
cosmogony of mutual help and co-operation, advanc- 
ing from lowly stages to even higher states of happy 
activity, world without end, and may catch in antici- 
pation some glimpses of that " one far-off divine event 
to which the whole creation moves." 

The whole controversy hinges, in one sense, on a 
practical pivot — the efficacy of prayer. Is prayer to 
hypothetical and supersensuous beings as senseless 
and useless as it is unscientific? or does prayer 
pierce through the husk and apparent covering of 
the sensuous universe, and reach something living, 
loving, and helpful beyond? 

And in another sense the controversy turns upon 
a question of fact. Do we live in a universe per- 
meated with life and mind : life and mind independ- 
ent of matter and unlimited in individual duration? 
Or is life limited, in space to the surface of masses of 
matter, and in time to the duration of the material 
envelope essential to its manifestation? 

The answer is given in one way by orthodox 
modern science, and in another way by Religion of 
all times ; and until these opposite answers are made 
consistent, the reconciliation between Science and 
Faith is incomplete. / 

23 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

THE RECONCILIATION 
III 

It may or may not have been observed, by anyone 
who has read the earlier portions of this paper, — but 
in so far as it has been missed, the whole meaning of 
the paper has been misconceived, — that when speak- 
ing of the atmosphere or the conclusions, the doctrines 
or the tendency of " science," I was careful always to 
explain that I meant orthodox or present-day science : 
meaning not the comprehensive grasp of a Newton, 
but science as now interpreted by its recognised offi- 
cial exponents, by the average Fellow of the Royal 
Society for instance ; just as by " faith " I intended 
not the ecstatic insight aroused in a seer by some 
momentary revelation, but the ordinary workaday 
belief of the average enlightened theologian. And 
my thesis was that the attitudes of mind appropriate 
to these two classes were at present fundamentally 
diverse; that there was still an outstanding contro- 
versy, or ground for controversy, between science 
and faith, although active fighting has been sus- 
pended, and although all bitterness has passed from 
the conflict, let us hope never to return. But the 
diversity remains, and for the present it is better so, 
if it has not achieved its work. Eliminating the 
bitterness, the conflict has been useful, and it would 
be far from well even to attempt to bring it to a 
close prematurely. But yet there must be an end to 
it some time ; reconciliation is bound to lie some- 
where in the future ; no two parts or aspects of the 

24 



A Physicist's Approach 

Universe can permanently and really be discordant. 
The only question is where the meeting-place may 
be; whether it is nearest to the orthodox faith or 
to the orthodox science of the present day. This 
question is the subject of the present or concluding 
portion of my article. Let me, greatly daring, pre- 
sume to enter upon the inquiry into what is really 
true and essential in the opposing creeds, how much 
of each has its origin in over-hasty assumption or 
fancy, and how far the opposing views are merely a 
natural consequence of imperfect vision of opposite 
sides of the same veil. 

First among the truths that will have to be ac- 
cepted by both sides, we may take the reign of Law, 
sometimes called the Uniformity of Nature. The 
discovery of uniformity must be regarded as mainly 
the work of Science : it did not come by revelation. 
In moments of inspiration it was glimpsed, — " the 
same yesterday, to-day, and for ever," — but the 
glimpse was only momentary, the Hebrew " atmos- 
phere " was saturated with the mists of cataclysm, 
visible judgments, and conspicuous interferences. 
We used to be told that the Creator's methods 
were adapted to the stage of His creatures, and 
varied from age to age: that it was really His 
actions, and not their mode of regarding them, that 
varied. The doctrine of uniformity first took root 
and grew in scientific soil. 

At first sight this doctrine of uniformity excludes 
Divine control, excludes anything in the nature of 
personal will, of intention, of guidance, of adaptation, 
of management. The law of evolution proceeds still 

25 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

further in the same direction; it shows that things 
change and how they change, and it attempts to 
show why they change. The Darwinian form of it 
attempts to account for the origin of species by 
inevitable necessity, free from artificial selection or 
operations analogous to those of the breeder. Tele- 
ology has gone, and guidance and purpose appear 
to have gone with it. 

At first sight, but at first sight only. So might a 
spectator, witnessing some great and perfect factory, 
with machines constantly weaving patterns, some 
beautiful, some ugly, conclude, or permit himself to 
dream at least, after some hours' watching, during 
which everything proceeded without a hitch, driven 
as it were by inexorable fate, that everything went of 
itself, controlled by cold dreary necessity. And if 
his inspection could be continued for weeks or years, 
and it still presented the same aspect, the dream 
would begin to seem to be true : the perfection of 
mechanism would weary the observer: his human 
weakness would long for something to go wrong, so 
that someone from an upper office might step down 
and set it right again. Humanity is accustomed to 
such interventions and breaks in a ceaseless sequence, 
and, when no such breaks and interventions occur, 
may conclude hastily that the scheme is self-originat- 
ing, self-sustained, that it works to no ultimate and 
foreseen destiny. 

So sometimes, looking at the east end of London, 
or many another only smaller city, has the feeling of 
despair seized men : they wonder what it can all 
mean. So, on the other hand, looking at the loom 

26 






A Physicist's Approach 

of nature, has the feeling, not of despair, but of what 
has been called atheism, one ingredient of atheism, 
arisen : atheism never fully realised, and wrongly so 
called ; recently it has been called severe Theism 
indeed; for it is joyful sometimes, interested and 
placid always, exultant at the strange splendour of 
the spectacle which its intellect has laid bare to 
contemplation, satisfied with the perfection of the 
mechanism, content to be a part of the self-generated 
organism, and endeavouring to think that the feelings 
of duty, of earnest effort, and of faithful service, which 
conspicuously persist in spite of all discouragement, 
are on this view intelligible as well as instinctive, and 
sure that nothing less than unrepining, unfaltering, 
unswerving acquiescence is worthy of our dignity as 
man. 

The law of evolution not only studies change and 
progress, it seeks to trace sequences back to antece- 
dents : it strains after the origin of all things. But 
ultimate origins are inscrutable. Let us admit, as 
scientific men, that of real origin, even of the simplest 
thing, we know nothing; not even of a pebble. Sand 
is the debris of rocks, and fresh rocks can be formed 
of compacted sand; but this suggests infinity, not 
origin. Infinity is non-human and we shrink from it, 
yet what else can there be in space? And if in space, 
why not in time also? Much to be said here, per- 
haps, but let it pass. We must admit that science 
knows nothing of ultimate origins. Which first, the 
hen or the Ggg? is a trivial form of a very real puzzle. 
That the world, in the sense of this planet, this homely 
lump of matter we call the earth — that this had an 

27 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

origin, a history, a past, intelligible more or less, 
growingly intelligible to the eye of science, is true 
enough. The date when it was molten can be roughly 
estimated ; the manner and mechanism of the birth 
of the moon has been guessed : the earth and moon 
then originated in one sense ; before that they were 
part of a nebula, like the rest of the solar system ; 
and some day the solar system may again be part of 
a nebula, by reason of collision with some at present 
tremendously distant mass. But all that is nothing 
to the Universe ; nothing even to the visible universe. 
The collisions there take place every now and again 
before our eyes. The Universe is full of lumps of 
matter of every imaginable size : the history of a 
solar system maybe written — its birth and also its 
death, separated may be by millions of millions of 
years; but what of that? It is but an episode, a 
moment in the eternal cosmogony, and the eye of 
history looks to what happened before the birth and 
after the death of any particular aggregate; just as a 
child may trace the origin and destruction of a soap 
bubble, the form of which is evanescent, the material 
of which is permanent. 

While the soap bubble lived it was the scene of 
much beauty and of a kind of law and order impos- 
sible to the mere water and soap out of which it was 
made, and into which again it has collapsed. The 
history of the soap bubble can be written, but there 
is a before and an after. So it is with the solar 
system ; so with any assigned collocation of matter in 
the universe. No point in space can be thought of 
" at which if a man stand it shall be impossible for 

28 



A Physicist's Approach 

him to cast a javelin into the beyond " ; nor can any 
epoch be conceived in time at which the mind will 
not instantly and automatically inquire, " and what 
before," or " what after " ? 

Yet does the human mind pine for something finite : 
it longs for a beginning, even if it could dispense 
with an end. It has tried of late to imagine that the 
law of dissipation of energy was a heaven-sent mes- 
sage of the finite duration of the Universe, so that 
before everything was, it could seek a Great First 
Cause ; and after everything had been, could take 
refuge once more in Him. 

Seen more closely, these are childish notions. 
They would be no real help if they were true ; they 
cannot be true, no more than any other fairy tale 
suitable for children. 

In the dawn of civilisation, God walked in the 
garden in the cool of the day. Down to say the 
middle of the nineteenth century He brought things 
into existence by a creative Fiat, and looked on His 
work for a time with approbation ; only to step down 
and destroy a good deal of it before many years had 
elapsed, and to patch it up and try to mend it from 
time to time. 

All very human : the endless rumble of the ma- 
chinery is distressing, perfection is intolerable. Still 
more intolerable is imperfection not attended to ; the 
machinery groans, lacks oil, shows signs of wear, 
some of the fabrics it is weaving are hideous ; why, 
why, does no one care? Surely the manager will 
step down and put one of the looms to rights, or 
scold a workman, or tell us what it is all for, and why 

29 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

he needs the woven fabric, der Gottheit lebendiges 
Kleid y before long. 

We see that he does not now interfere, not even 
when things go very wrong ; the " hands " are left to 
put things right as best they can, nothing mysterious 
ever happens now, it is all commonplace and semi-in- 
telligible ; we ourselves could easily throw a machine 
out of gear; we do, sometimes; we ourselves, if we 
are clever enough and patient enough, could even per- 
form the far harder task of putting one right again ; 
we could even suggest fresh patterns ; we seem to be 
more than onlookers — as musicians and artists we 
can create — perhaps we are foremen ; and if ideas 
occur to us, why should we not throw them into the 
common stock? There is no head manager at all, 
this thing has been always running ; as the hands die 
off, others take their places; they have not been 
selected or appointed to the job ; they are only here 
as the fittest of a large number which have not sur- 
vived ; even the looms seem to have a self-mending, 
self-regenerative power; and we ourselves, we are 
not looking at it or assisting in it for long. When 
we go, other brilliantly-endowed and inventive spec- 
tators or helpers will take our places. We under- 
stand the whole arrangement now ; it is simpler than 
at first we thought. 

Is it, then, so simple? Does the uniformity and 
the eternity and the self-sustainedness of it make it 
the easier to understand? Are we so sure that the 
guidance and control are not really continuous, in- 
stead of being, as we expected, intermittent? May 
we be not looking at the working of the Manager all 

3° 



A Physicist's Approach 

the time, and at nothing else? Why should He step 
down and interfere with Himself? 

That is the lesson science has to teach theology — 
to look for the action of the Deity, if at all, then 
always ; not in the past alone, nor only in the future, 
but equally in the present. If His action is not visible 
now, it never will be, and never has been visible. 

Shall we look for it in toy eruptions in the West 
Indies? As well look for it in the fall of a child's 
box of bricks ! Shall we hope to see the Deity some 
day step out of Himself and display His might or His 
love or some other attribute? We can see Him now 
if we look ; if we cannot see, it is only that our eyes 
are shut. 

" Closer is He than breathing, nearer than hands or feet : " — 

poetry, yes — but also science ; the real trend and 
meaning of Science, whether of orthodox " science " 
or not. 

IV 

THERE is nothing new in Pantheism : — indeed no ! 
But there are different kinds of pantheism. That the 
All is a manifestation, a revelation of God, — that it 
is in a manner, a dim and ungraspable manner, in 
some sort God Himself, — may be readily granted ; 
but what does the All include ? It were a strange 
kind of All that included mountains and trees, the 
forces of nature, and the visible material universe 
only, and excluded the intelligence, the will, the 
emotions, the individuality or personality, of which 

3i 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

we ourselves are immediately conscious. Shall we 
possess these things and God not possess them? 
That would be no pantheism at all. Any power, 
any love, of which we ourselves are conscious does 
thereby certainly exist ; and so it must exist in highly 
intensified and nobler form in the totality of things, 

— unless we make the grotesque assumption that in 
all the infinite universe we denizens of planet Earth 
are the highest. Let no worthy human attribute be 
denied to the Deity. There are many errors, but 
there is one truth, in Anthropomorphism. Whatever 
worthy attribute belongs to man, be it personality or 
any other, its existence in the Universe is thereby 
admitted ; we can deny it no more. 

The only conceivable way of denying personality, 
and effort, and failure, and renewed effort, and con- 
sciousness, and love, and hate too, for that matter, in 
the real whole of things, is to regard them as illusory, 

— physiological and purely material illusions in our- 
selves. Even so, they are in some sense there ; they 
are not unreal, however they are to be accounted 
for. We must blink nothing ; evolution is a truth, a 
strange and puzzling truth ; " the whole creation 
groaneth and travaileth together " ; and the most 
perfect of all the sons of men, the likest God this 
planet ever saw, He to whom many look for their idea 
of what God is, surely He taught us that suffering, 
and sacrifice, and wistful yearning for something not 
yet attainable were not to be regarded as human 
attributes alone. 

Must we not admit the evil attributes also? In 
the Whole, yes ; but one of our experiences is that 

32 



A Physicist's Approach 

there are grades of existence. We recognise that in 
ourselves the ape and tiger are dying out, that the 
germs of higher faculties have made their appear- 
ance; it is an intensification of the higher that we 
may infer in the more advanced grades of exist- 
ence; intensification of the lower lies behind and 
beneath us. 

The inference or deduction of some of the attributes 
of Deity, from that which we can recognise as " the 
likest God within the soul," is a legitimate deduction, 
if properly carried out; and it is in close corres- 
pondence with the methods of physical science. It 
has been said that from the properties of a drop of 
water the possibility of a Niagara or an Atlantic 
might be inferred by a man who had seen or heard 
of neither. 1 And it is true that by experiment on a 
small quantity of water a man with the brain of New- 
ton and the mathematical power and knowledge of Sir 
G. G. Stokes could deduce by pure reasoning most 
if not all of the inorganic phenomena of an ocean ; 
and that not vaguely but definitely ; the existence of 
waves on its surface, the rate at which they would 
travel as dependent upon distance from crest to 
crest, their maximum height, their length as depend- 
ing on depth of sea; the existence of ripples also, 
going at a different pace and following a different 
law ; the breaking of waves upon a shore ; the tides 
also ; the ocean currents caused by inequalities of 
temperature, and many other properties which are 
realised in an actual ocean : — not as topographical 
realities indeed, but as necessary theoretical conse- 
1 Sir Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 
3 33 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

quences of the hypothetical existence of so great a 
mass of water. Reasoning from the small to the 
great is legitimate reasoning, notwithstanding that by- 
increase of size phenomena wholly different and at 
first sight unexpected come into being. No one not 
a mathematician looking at a drop of water could 
infer the Atlantic billows or the tides : but they are 
all there in embryo, given gravitation; and yet not 
there in actuality in even the smallest degree. People 
sometimes think that increase of size is mere mag- 
nification, and introduces no new property. They 
are mistaken. Waves could not be on a drop, nor 
tides either, nor waterspouts, nor storms. The simple 
fact that the earth is large makes it retain an atmos- 
phere ; and the existence of an atmosphere enhances 
the importance of a globe beyond all comparison, and 
renders possible plant and animal life. The simple 
fact that the sun is very large makes it hot, i. e. en- 
ables it to generate heat, and so fits it to be the centre 
and source of energy to worlds of habitable activity. 

To suppose that the deduction of divine attributes 
by intensification of our own attributes must neces- 
sarily result in a " magnified non-natural man " is to 
forget these facts of physical science. If the rea- 
soning is bad, or the data insufficient, the result is 
worthless, but the method is legitimate, though 
far from easy ; and it is hardly to be expected that 
the science of theology has yet had its Newton, or 
even its Copernicus. 1 At present it is safest to walk 

1 Theologians may differ from this estimate ; and if so, I de- 
fer to their opinion. It is well known that the topics slightly 
glanced at in the first half of this section have been profoundly 

34 



A Physicist's Approach 

by faith and inspiration ; and it is the saint and 
prophet rather than the theologian whom humanity 
would prefer to trust. 



Now let us go back to our groping inquiry — to the 
series of questions left unanswered in the latter por- 
tion of Part II. of this paper, and ask, what then of 
prayer, regarded scientifically ; of miracle, if we like 
to call it miracle; of the region not only of emotion 
and intelligence, but of active work, guidance, and 
interference? Are these, after all, so rigorously ex- 
cluded by the reign of law? Are not these also parts 
of its kingdom? Shall law apply only to the inor- 
ganic and the non-living? Shall it not rule the 
domain of life and of mind too? Speaking or think- 
ing of the Universe, we must exclude no part ; 

" All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
Whose body nature is, and God the soul ; " 

" For as the reasonable soul and human flesh is one man " — 

glimpses of truth, poor distorted glimpses, even as 
this paper: what more can be expected of us? 

studied by them ; but the subject is so difficult that an outsider 
can hardly assume that as much progress has been made in 
Theology as in the physical sciences. Not so much progress 
has been made even in the biological sciences as in the more 
specifically physical. It is sometimes said that biology has had 
its Newton, but it is not so : Darwin was its Copernicus, and 
revolutionised ideas as the era of Copernicus did. Newton did 
not revolutionise ideas : his was a synthetic and deductive era. 

35 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

Let us take this question of guidance. We must 
see it in action now or never. Do we see it now? 
Orthodox theology vaguely assumes it ; orthodox 
science sees it not at all. What is the truth? Is the 
blindness of science subjective or objective? Is 
the vision absent because there is nothing to see, or 
because we have shut our eyes, and have declined 
to contemplate a region of dim and misty fact? 

Take the origin of species by the persistence of 
favourable variations, how is the appearance of those 
same favourable variations accounted for? Except 
by artificial selection, not at all. Given their appear- 
ance, their development by struggle and inheritance 
and survival can be explained ; but that they arose 
spontaneously, by random change without purpose, is 
an assertion which cannot be made. Does anyone 
think that the skill of the beaver, the instinct of the 
bee, the genius of a man, arose by chance, and that 
its presence is accounted for by handing down and 
by survival? What struggle for existence will ex- 
plain the advent of Beethoven? What pitiful neces- 
sity for earning a living as a dramatist will educe for 
us Shakespeare ? These things are beyond science 
of the orthodox type; then let it be silent and deny 
nothing in the Universe till it has at least made an 
honest effort to grasp the whole. 

Genius, however, science has made an effort not 
wholly to ignore ; but take other human faculties — 
Premonition, Inspiration, Prevision, Telepathy — 
what is the meaning of these things? Orthodox 
science refuses to contemplate them, orthodox the- 
ology also looks at some of them askance. Many 

36 



A Physicist's Approach 

philosophers have relegated them to the region of 
the unconscious, or the subconscious, where dwell 
things of nothing worth. A few Psychologists are 
beginning to attend. 

Men of religion can hold aloof or not as they 
please : probably they had better hold aloof until the 
scientific basis of these things has been rendered 
more secure. At present they are beyond the pale 
of science, but they are some of them inside the 
Universe of fact, — all of them, as I now begin to 
believe, — and their meaning must be extracted. So 
long as this region is ignored, dogmatic science 
should be silent. It has a right to its own adopted 
region, it has no right to be heard outside. It 
cannot see guidance, it cannot recognise the mean- 
ing of the whole trend of things, the constant lead- 
ings, the control, the help, the revelations, the 
beckonings, beyond our normal bodily and mental 
powers. No, for it will not look. What becomes of 
an intelligence which has left this earth? Whence 
comes the nascent intelligence which arrives? What 
is the meaning of our human personality and individ- 
uality? Did we spring into existence a few years 
ago? Do we cease to exist a few years hence? 
It does not know. It does not want to know. 

Does theology seek enlightenment any more ener- 
getically? No; it is satisfied with its present in- 
formation, which some people mistake for divine 
knowledge on these subjects. Divine knowledge is 
perhaps not obtained so easily. 

At present, in the cosmic scheme we strangely 
draw the line at man. We know of every grade of 

37 ' 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

life from the amoeba upwards, with some slight miss- 
ing link here and there, — and these led up to by 
plants, and perhaps, though doubtfully, by crystals, 
— but the series terminates with man. From man 
the scale of existence is supposed to step to God. 
Is it not somewhat sudden? The step in the other 
direction, from man to the amoeba, is as nothing to 
it. Yet that is a wide gap; wide, but not infinite. 
Why this sudden jump from the altitude of man 
into infinity? Are there no intermediate states of 
existence? 

Perhaps on other planets, — yes, bodily existence 
on other planets is probable, not necessarily on any 
planet of our solar system, but that is a trifle in the 
visible universe ; it is as our little five-roomed house 
among all the dwellings of mankind. But why on 
other planets only? Why bodily existence only? 
Why think solely of those incarnate personalities 
from whom, by reason of bodily location, we are 
most isolated? Because we feel more akin to such, 
and we know of no others. A good answer so far, 
and a true. But do we wish to learn? Have we our 
minds open? A few men of science have adduced 
evidence of intelligence not wholly inaccessible and 
yet not familiarly accessible, intelligence perhaps a 
part of ourselves, perhaps a part of others, intelli- 
gence which seems closely connected with the region 
of genius, of telepathy, of clairvoyance, to which I 
have briefly referred. 

Suppose for a moment that there were a God. 
Science has never really attempted to deny His exist- 
ence. Conceive a scientific God. How would He 

38 



A Physicist's Approach 

work? Surely not by speech or by intermittent per- 
sonal interference. He would be in, and among, and 
of, the whole scheme of things. The universe is 
governed by law ; effect is connected with cause ; 1 if 
a thing moves it is because something moves it; 2 
effects are due and only due to agents. If there be 
guidance or control, it must be by agents that it is 
exerted. Then what in the scheme of things would 
be His agents? 

Surely among such agents we must recognise our- 
selves: we can at least consider how we and other 
animals work. Watch the bird teaching its young to 
fly, the mother teaching a child to read, the statesman 
nursing the destiny of a new-born nation. Is there 
no guidance there? 

What is the meaning of legislation and municipal 
government, and acts of reform, and all the struggle 
after better lives for ourselves and others? 

Pure automatism, say some ; an illusion of free will. 
Possibly ; but even a dream is not an absolute nonen- 
tity ; the effort, however it be expressed or accounted 
for, exists. 

What is all the effort — regarded scientifically — 
but the action of the totality of things trying to im- 
prove itself, striving still to evolve something higher, 
holier, and happier out of an inchoate mass? There 
may be many other ways of regarding it, but this is 
one. Failures, mistakes, sins, — yes, they exist; evo- 
lution would be meaningless if perfection were already 
attained ; but surely even now we see some progress, 

1 If this involves controversy, then sequent with antecedent. 

2 This I wish to maintain in spite of controversy. 

39 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

surely the effort of our saints is bearing fruit. This 
planet has laboured long and patiently for the advent 
of a human race, for millions of years it was the abode 
of strange beasts, and now recently it has become the 
abode of man. What but imperfection would you ex- 
pect? May it not be suggested that conscious evil or 
vice looms rather large in our eyes, oppresses us with 
a somewhat exaggerated sense of its cosmic import- 
ance, because it is peculiarly characteristic of the 
human stage of development: the lower animals 
know little or nothing of it; they may indeed do 
things which in men would be vicious, but that is 
just what vice is — reversion to a lower type after 
perception of a higher. The consciousness of crime, 
the active pursuit of degradation, does not arise till 
something like human intelligence is reached; and 
only a little higher up it ceases again. It appears 
to be a stage rather rapidly passed through in the 
cosmic scheme. Greed, for instance, greed in the 
widest sense, accumulation for accumulation's sake : 
it is a human defect, and one responsible for much 
misery to-day; but it arose recently, and already it 
is felt to be below the standard of the race. A stage 
very little above present humanity, not at all above 
the higher grades of present humanity, and we shall 
be free from it again. 

Let us be thankful we have got thus far, and 
struggle on a little further. It is our destiny, and 
whether here or elsewhere it will be accomplished. 

We are God's agents, visible and tangible agents, 
and we can help ; we ourselves can answer some 
kinds of prayer, so it be articulate ; we ourselves can 

40 



A Physicist's Approach 

interfere with the course of inanimate nature, can 
make waste places habitable, and habitable places 
waste. Xot by breaking laws do we ever influence 
nature — we cannot break a law of nature, it is not 
brittle, we only break ourselves if we try — but by 
obeying them. In accordance with law we have to 
act, but act we can and do, and through us acts the 
Deity. 

And perhaps not alone through us. We are the 
highest bodily organisms on this material planet, and 
the material control of it belongs to us. It is subject 
to the laws of Physics and to the laws of our minds 
operating through our bodies. If there are other 
beings near us they do not trespass. It is our 
sphere, so far as Physics are concerned. If there are 
exceptions to this statement, stringent proof must be 
forthcoming. 

Assertions are made that under certain strange con- 
ditions physical interference does occur ; but there is 
always a person present in an unusual state when 
these things happen, and until we know more of the 
power of the unconscious human personality, it is 
simplest to assume that these physical acts are 
due, whether consciously or unconsciously, to that 
person. 

But what about our mental acts? We can operate 
on each other's minds through our physical envelope, 
by speech and writing and in other ways, but we can 
do more : it appears that we can operate at a dis- 
tance, by no apparent physical organ or medium; 
if by mechanism at all, then by mechanism at any 
rate unknown to us. 

4i 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

If we are open to influence from each other by 
non-corporeal methods, may we not be open to in- 
fluence from beings in another region or of another 
order? And if so, may we not be aided, inspired, 
guided, by a cloud of witnesses, — not witnesses 
only, but helpers, agents like ourselves of the im- 
manent God? 

How do we know that in the mental sphere these 
cannot answer prayer, as we in the physical? It is 
not a speculation only, it is a question for experience 
to decide. Are we conscious of guidance? do we 
feel that prayers are answered? that power to do, and 
to will, and to think is given us ? Many there are 
who with devout thankfulness will say yes. 

They attribute it to the Deity ; so can we attribute 
everything to the Deity, from thunder and lightning 
down to daily bread; but is it direct action? Does 
He work without agents? That is what our feel- 
ings tell us, but it is difficult to discriminate ; and 
fortunately it is not necessary; the whole is linked 
together, 

" Bound by gold chains about the feet of God," 

and through it all His energising Spirit runs. On 
any hypothesis it must be to the Lord that we pray 
— to the highest we know or can conceive ; but the 
answer shall come in ways we do not know, and 
there must always be a far Higher than ever we can 
conceive. 

Religious people seem to be losing some of their 
faith in prayer : they think it scientific not to pray in 
the sense of simple petition. They may be right: it 

42 



A Physicist's Approach 

may be the highest attitude never to ask for anything 
specific, only for acquiescence. If saints feel it so, 
they are doubtless right, but, so far as ordinary 
science has anything to say to the contrary, a more 
childlike attitude might turn out truer, more in ac- 
cordance with the total scheme. Prayer for a fancied 
good that might really be an injury, would be foolish; 
prayer for breach of law would be not foolish only 
but profane ; but who are we to dogmatise too posi- 
tively concerning law? A martyr may have prayed 
that he should not feel the fire. Can it be doubted 
that, whether through what we call hypnotic sug- 
gestion or by some other name, the granting of it 
was at least possible? Prayer, we have been told, is 
a mighty engine of achievement, but we have ceased 
to believe it. Why should we be so incredulous? 
Even in medicine, for instance, it is not really absurd 
to suggest that drugs and no prayer may be almost 
as foolish as prayer and no drugs. 1 Mental and 



1 Diseases are like weeds ; gardening is a bacteriological 
problem. Some bacteria are good and useful and necessary; 
they act in digestion, in manures, etc. ; others are baleful and 
mean disease. The gardener, like the physician, has to culti- 
vate the plants and eradicate the weeds. If he ignores the 
existence of weeds and says they are all plants, he speaks truth 
as a botanist, but is not a practical gardener. If he says 
" gardening is all effort on my part, and nothing comes from the 
sky, I will dig and I will water, I care not for casual rain or for 
sun," he errs foolishly on one side. If he says " the sun and 
the rain do everything, there is no need for my exertion," he 
errs on the other side, and errs more dangerously ; because he 
can abstain from action, whereas he cannot exclude rain and 
sun, however much he presumes to ignore them : he ought to 

43 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

physical are interlocked. The crudities of " faith- 
healing" have a germ of truth, perhaps as much 
truth as can be claimed by those who contemn them. 
How do we know that each is not ignoring one side, 
that each is but half educated, each only adopting 
half measures? The whole truth may be completer 
and saner than the sectaries dream: more things 

may be 

" wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of." 

We are not bodies alone, nor spirits alone, but 
both ; our bodies isolate us, our spirits unite us : if 
I may venture on two lines, we are like 

Floating lonely icebergs, our crests above the ocean, 
With deeply submerged portions united by the sea. 

The conscious part is knowing, the subconscious 
part is ignorant: yet the subconscious can achieve 
results the conscious can by no means either under- 
stand or perform. Witness the physical operations 
of " suggestion " and the occasional lucidity of trance. 

Each one of us has a great region of the subcon- 
scious, to which we do not and need not attend ; 
only let us not deny it, let us not cut ourselves off 
from its sustaining power: if we have instinct for 
worship, for prayer, for communion with saints or 
with Deity, let us trust that instinct, for there lies 
the true realm of religion. We may try to raise the 

be a part of the agency at work. Sobriety and sanity consist in 
recognising all the operative causes — spiritual, mental, and 
material. 

44 






A Physicist's Approach 

subconscious region into the light of day, and study 
it with our intellect also ; but let us not assume that 
our present conscious intelligence is already so well 
informed that its knowledge exhausts or determines 
or bounds^, the region of the true and the possible. 



VI 

As to what is scientifically possible or impossible, 
anything not self-contradictory or inconsistent with 
other truth is possible. Speaking from our present 
scientific ignorance, and in spite of the extract from 
Professor Tyndall quoted in Part I. of this paper, 
this statement must be accepted as literally true, for 
all we know to the. contrary. There may be reasons 
why certain things do not occur: our experience 
tells us that they do not, and we may judge that 
there is some reason why they do not ; there may be 
an adaptation, an arrangement among the forces of 
nature — the forces of nature in their widest sense — 
which enchains them and screens us from their de- 
structive action, after the same sort of fashion as 
the atmosphere screens the earth from the furious 
meteoric buffeting it would otherwise encounter on 
its portentous journey through ever new and untried 
depths of space. 1 

We may indeed be well protected ; we must, else 
we should not be here ; but as to what is possible — 

1 The earth does not describe anything like a closed curve 
per annum ; the sun advances rather more than ten miles per 
second, in what is practically a straight line. 

45 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

think of any lower creature, low enough in the scale 
of existence to ignore us, and to treat us, too, as 
among the forces of nature, and then let us bethink 
ourselves of how we may appear, not to God or to 
any infinite being, but to some personified influence 
high above us in the scale of existence. Consider a 
colony of ants, and conceive them conscious at their 
level; what know they of fate and of the future? 
Much what we know. They may think themselves 
governed by uniform law — uniform, that is, even to 
their understanding — the march of the seasons, the 
struggle for existence, the weight of the soil, the 
properties of matter as they encounter it — no more. 
For centuries they may have continued thus ; when 
one day, quite unexpectedly, a shipwrecked sailor 
strolling round kicks their ant-hill over. To and fro 
they run, overwhelmed with the catastrophe. What 
shall hinder his crushing them with his heel? Labo- 
rare est orare in their case. Let him watch them and 
see, or fancy that he sees, in their movements the 
signs of industry, of system, of struggle against un- 
toward circumstance; let him note the moving of 
eggs, the trying to save and to repair : — the act of 
destruction may by that means be averted. 

Just as our earth is midway among the lumps of 
matter, neither small like a meteoric stone, nor 
gigantic like a sun, so may be the place we, the 
human race, occupy in the scale of existence. All 
our ordinary views are based on the notion that 
we are highest in the scale; upset that notion and 
anything is possible. Possible, but we have to ascer- 
tain the facts, not what might, but what does occur. 

46 



A Physicist's Approach 

Into the lives of the lower creatures caprice assuredly 
seems to enter ; the treatment of a fly by a child is 
capricious, and may be regarded as puzzling to the fly. 
As we rise in the scale of existence we hope that 
things get better ; we have experience that they do. 
It may be said that up to a point in the scale of life 
vice and caprice increase ; that the lower organisms 
and the plant world know nothing of them, and that 
man has been most wicked of all ; but they reach a 
maximum at a certain stage — a stage the best of the 
human race have already passed — and we need not 
postulate either vice or caprice in our far superiors. 
Men have thought themselves the sport of the gods 
before now, but let us hope they were mistaken. 
Such thoughts would lead to madness and despair. 
We do not know the laws which govern the interac- 
tion of different orders of intelligence, nor do we 
know how much may depend on our own attitude 
and conduct. It may be that prayer is an instru- 
ment which can control or influence higher agencies, 
and by its neglect we may be losing the use of a 
mighty engine to help on our lives and those of 
others. 

The Universe is huge and awful every way, we 
might so easily be crushed by it ; we need the help 
of every agency available, and if we had no helpers 
we should stand a poor chance. The loneliness of 
it when we leave the planet would be appalling ; 
sometimes even here the loneliness is great. 

What the " protecting atmosphere " for our dis- 
embodied souls may be, I know not. Some may 
liken the protection to the care of a man for a dog, 

47 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

of a woman for a child, of a far-seeing minister for 
a race of bewildered slaves; while others may dash 
aside the contemplation of all intermediaries and 
agencies, and feel themselves safe and enfolded in 
the protecting love of God Himself. 

The region of Religion and the region of a com- 
pleter Science are one. 

OLIVER LODGE. 



48 



A BIOLOGICAL APPROACH 

PROFESSOR J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 

Natural History Department, University of Aberdeen 

PROFESSOR PATRICK GEDDES 

University Hall, Edinburgh 

Introductory 

FOR half a century there has been more friction 
between Biology and Theology than between 
any other two expressions of Science and of Faith, 
and the reasons for this are fairly obvious. Biology 
deals with life, — its nature, continuance, and evolu- 
tion, — including Human Life, and has come to con- 
clusions some of which do not fit in well with the 
theological doctrines of the world and of man; bio- 
logical discipline fosters certain habits of mind and a 
conception of the world which prompt recoil from 
various theological doctrines that touch the facts of 
life, or foreclose questions which these doctrines 
raise ; biology, as a relatively young science, has 
often exhibited the self-confidence and intolerance 
associated with youth ; and finally, not a few on both 
sides have rushed into the controversial lists without 
due acquaintance with the rules of intellectual tourna- 
ment, as is illustrated when the biologist makes merry 
over Jonah's whale, or when the defender of the faith 
entitles his book, " God or Natural Selection." 
4 49 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

Although there has never been much love lost 
between Biology and Theology, we cannot say that 
there is any unanimity in the attitude which biolo- 
gists have assumed, or assume, in regard to theologi- 
cal doctrines. Some are or have been aggressively 
hostile, such as Haeckel and Huxley ; others assume 
or really feel a nonchalant indifference, having no 
use for theology ; others affect a superficial acquies- 
cence, either by keeping idea-tight compartments in 
their cerebral machinery, or by condescending to 
verbal devices. And there are others, who feel the 
opposition to be real and deep, but who try to effect 
friendly contact and mutual appreciation, of an emo- 
tional sort at least. 

Similarly, theologians are far from unanimity in 
their attitude towards biology. There are those who 
invade the biological camp, discovering mistakes 
in Darwinism, incompleteness everywhere, and the 
amateurishness of the biologist when he tries to be 
a philosopher. Others affect or feel indifference, 
and are in their fastnesses quite unmoved by any- 
thing the biologist may have to say regarding hered- 
ity or man's place in nature. Others, more facile, 
express a superficial acquiescence and an indulgent 
tolerance: they have an elastic eclectic system, 
capable of ingesting all data vouched for by respect- 
able authorities, or a legerdemain practice with verbal 
devices, or, like some of their scientific brethren, the 
art of keeping idea-tight compartments in their brains. 
And there are a few who try to understand what 
biologists are after, who endeavour to utilise biologi- 
cal data by subliming them sub specie <zternitatis> who 

5° 



A Biological Approach 

even seek to re-adjust the theological interpretations 
of man and the world to new facts. 

Controversy and friction must be regarded as often 
useful, but no one with a knowledge of the thrusts 
and parries between Biology and Theology since the 
publication of the "Origin of Species " (1859) will 
deny that much of the controversy has been needless 
waste of time and energy. Much of it is merely 
beating or heating the air; and there have been 
faults on both sides. 

The biologist has been at fault — in combating 
doctrines and modes of interpretation which no in- 
tellectual combatant on the other side is concerned 
to defend ; in exciting himself over minutiae which 
are but outworks of the citadel of faith, or historical 
vestiges of a plan of campaign now almost forgotten ; 
in misunderstanding the aim of theology; and in 
failing to realise the need of religion to men as they 
are, or its value which is both historically and experi- 
mentally demonstrable. 

The theologian also has been at fault,, sometimes 
in keeping aloof from the order of facts which Bio- 
logy represents, and affecting a detachment which is 
contrary to the genius of Christianity ; sometimes in 
misunderstanding what the aim of science is ; some- 
times in carping at minutiae ; and oftenest perhaps, 
in imagining that his transcendental formulae can 
continue to be valid if they remain static. 

What is most needed is self-criticism on both sides, 
and that the biologists and the theologians should 
meet as men of good-will to discuss their respective 
ideals and difficulties. This Eirenikon is intended as 

5* 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

a contribution towards that mutual understanding 
and respect that makes for peace, and we have 
devoted the bulk of our essay to four or five biologi- 
cal problems, the provisional solutions of which tend 
to be at variance with theological doctrines. 



I. Illustration of Some Biological Problems, 

the Provisional Solutions of which 

tend to be at variance with 

Theological Doctrines 

A. Biological Analysis. Science is not any par- 
ticular body of facts : it is essentially the expression 
of an intellectual attitude or mood in relation to any 
order of phenomena. The distinctive feature is in 
the method, — making sure of facts, classifying them, 
analysing them into their simplest adequate expres- 
sion, observing their inter-relations, grouping them 
according to their likenesses of co-existence and 
sequence, and inventing descriptive formulae which 
sum them up in terms of our perceptual experience. 

Thus the biologist, who may be, in other moods, a 
poet, or a philosopher, or religious, seeks, as a biolo- 
gist, to interpret scientifically the nature, continuance, 
and evolution of life. He becomes aware of certain 
facts (fractions of reality, no doubt) which interest 
him ; he proceeds to make himself more intimately 
acquainted with these, that is, to make his sensory 
experience of them as full as possible; he seeks to 
arrange them in ordered series, to detect their inter- 
relations and likenesses of sequence, to reduce them to 

5 2 



A Biological Approach 

simpler terms, to find their common denominator ; and 
he finally tries to sum them up in a general formula, 
which he often, unfortunately, calls a " law." But he 
does not delude himself by imagining that his " law" 
is an explanation of the facts which it formulates. 

It follows then, that biological analysis is working, 
and must work in a direction the very opposite of 
that of theological interpretation. We work with 
William of Occam's razor (entia non sunt multipli- 
canda prceter necessitatetri) ; " entities " are more and 
more closely shorn off; " principles " of life and 
growth, of development and heredity, vanish; " vital 
force " reluctantly disappears ; the " vegetable soul " 
has gone, and, for many cases, the " animal soul " has 
followed. We work towards a common denominator 
— " protoplasm," which if it appears simple to the 
easy-going, is certainly not simple to the expert. 

The mediaeval biologist was almost forced to be 
" spiritualistic," he had to assume "animal spirits" 
and " vital spirits," " principles of life," " vital forces," 
and " vires formativce" Then came Harvey's demon- 
stration of some main factors in the circulation of 
the blood, the first of a long series of attempts to ex- 
press vital phenomena in terms of mechanism, — 
attempts which put an end to the reign of " spirits," 
though not to the intrusion of metaphysical princi- 
ples. Each great step in physiological analysis, 
especially after the establishment of the doctrine of 
the conservation of energy, has been followed by 
enthusiastic adherence to the mechanical theory, and 
then, as surely, has followed a re-action to vitalistic 
views. Again and again the enthusiasm of discovery 

53 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

has led to a short-lived belief that the secret of the 
organism was about to be solved ; but biologists have 
always come sooner or later to see that their pre- 
sumed interpretations were in terms of things that 
themselves required to be interpreted, that the phys- 
ico-chemical interpretation which dominated the 
mind for a time left residual phenomena unaccounted 
for, and that these residual phenomena were often 
quite essential. 

We are confronted to-day, as in the days of 
Johannes Miiller and Von Baer, with the opposed 
opinions of the mechanical and the vitalistic schools. 
On the one hand, there are those who say " that the 
further physiology advances, the more does it become 
possible to explain, on physical and chemical grounds, 
phenomena which have hitherto been regarded as 
associated with a special vital force ; that it is only a 
question of time ; that it will finally be shown that 
the whole process of life is only a more complicated 
form of motion regulated solely by the laws which 
govern inorganic nature." And it must be admitted 
that many chemical and physical processes have been 
detected and described in the internal economy of a 
living creature, and that results of great value have 
been obtained by theoretically abstracting some part 
of the body, such as heart or lungs, and treating it as 
a piece of mechanism, disregarding for the time being 
what is, however, essential, — its maintenance and 
growth, its control and determination as a member of 
the unity which we call organism. 

It may seem strange to ask whether the progress 
of nineteenth century physiology has been signalised 

54 



A Biological Approach 

by the achievement of re-expressing any vital phe- 
nomenon in terms of physics and chemistry. But it 
is, to say the least, very doubtful that there has been 
any such success. 

" To me," says Bunge, a physiologist of undeniable 
standing, " the history of physiology teaches the exact 
opposite. I think the more thoroughly and conscien- 
tiously we endeavour to study biological problems, 
the more are we convinced that even those processes 
which we have already regarded as explicable by 
chemical and physical laws, are in reality infinitely 
more complex, and at present defy any attempt at a 
mechanical explanation." 

Dr. J. S. Haldane goes even further : " If we look 
back at the phenomena which are capable of being 
stated, or explained in physico-chemical terms, we 
see at once that there is nothing in them characteris- 
tic of life. . . . We are now far more definitely aware 
of the obstacles to any advance in this (physico- 
chemical) direction, and there is not the slightest in- 
dication that they will be removed, but rather that 
with further increase of knowledge, and more refined 
methods of physical and chemical investigation, they 
will only appear more and more difficult to sur- 
mount." This is the modern vitalist position. 

We see, then, that while modern biology no longer 
postulates a "vital force," that is, a " hyper-mechan- 
ical" factor, a mystical power, a non-material agent, 
presiding over the activities of the body, it admits, 
through probably the majority of its experts, that the 
phenomena distinctive of life cannot at present be re- 
stated in the language of chemistry and physics. It 

55 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

may be asked, however, whether this is more than an 
argumentum ad ignorantiam. It is still morning on the 
dial of science, biological analysis is still in its youth, 
partial re-statements have been given of numerous 
functions, we know much in regard to the chemical 
aspects of metabolism, synthetic chemistry is still 
re-creating organic compounds from inorganic ele- 
ments, and so on. May we not reasonably expect 
some day to attain to an understanding of the chem- 
ical secret of protoplasm, in regard to which theories 
already abound? 

To this we can only answer, that at any given time 
we must take things as they are. Sufficient unto the 
day is the progress thereof. Moreover, if we could 
show that inorganic processes contain implicitly the 
potentiality of life, then our conception of what is 
often brutally called " dead matter " will have to be 
altered, that is all. Furthermore, as Karl Pearson 
says, " The problem of whether life is or is not a 
mechanism, is not a question of whether the same 
things, ' matter ' and ' force ' are or are not at the 
back of organic and inorganic phenomena, — of what 
is at the back of either class of sense-impressions we 
know absolutely nothing, — but of whether the con- 
ceptual shorthand of the physicist, this ideal world of 
ether, atom, and molecule, will or will not also suffice 
to describe the biologist's perceptions." Even if 
the physicist's formulae should fit vital phenomena — 
which they do not seem to do — there would be no 
" explanation" forthcoming, for "mechanism does not 
explain anything ! " 

It may be said, however, from the theological side : 
56 



A Biological Approach 

All this is mock modesty on your part; as men of 
science, you admit that it is not at present possible 
to re-describe the ways of life by physico-chemical 
formulae, yet at the bottom of your hearts you be- 
lieve that the organism is nothing more than a 
wonderful, self-storing, self-repairing engine with the 
power of growing and multiplying, as even crystals 
and complex molecules may do; you say that you 
cannot at present get below your common denomi- 
nator, to wit, the properties of protoplasm, if even 
you can always get so far in reducing the fractions 
of reality that you know, yet you are looking forward 
to some day reading the riddle of protoplasm, to 
seeing life, with Ostwald, for instance, as an intricate 
series of fermentations, or in some similar, to us 
equally fantastic way. After all, you are looking 
forward, more cautiously, perhaps, than before, but 
even more deliberately to shutting God out of His 
universe. To this we must simply answer, as before, 
that science is not concerned with theoretical may- 
be's of the future; that, not being philosophy, it 
does not seek to explain anything, merely to re- 
describe in conceptual formulae; and that, if the 
worst came to the worst, so to speak, or the best 
to the best, and we did understand the secret of 
protoplasm, that would not, to use Ruskin's cruel 
summary, prove that there is no use for a God, — a 
summary which was an irrelevancy quite unworthy 
of his sagaciously analytic mind — but would only 
show that there is no such thing as dead matter. 
The same line of argument may be adopted in regard 
to the attempted analysis of psychical phenomena in 

57 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

terms of physical categories, or of personal experi- 
ence in terms of sub-personal categories, but we 
leave this to the psychologist. 

B. The Doctrine of Heredity. Difficulties of an- 
other sort, more practical than those in Section A, 
arise when we consider the modern biological doc- 
trine of heredity. We can no longer think of Hered- 
ity as a Fate outside the organism, granting certain 
gifts and withholding others; we cannot biologically 
draw a distinction at the outset of a life between the 
heir and his inheritance, for they are identical. In- 
heritance is all that a living creature is or has to start 
with in virtue of the hereditary relation, — the relation 
of genetic continuity which binds an organism to its 
ancestry. Nurture, in the widest sense, may do much 
to modify a man's natural inheritance, or the expres- 
sion of it as the man develops ; but we have little 
warrant for believing that nurture can transmissibly 
change nature in such a way that the acquired gains 
or losses of parents are entailed on their offspring. 
Mental characteristics (including moral) are inherited, 
like physical characteristics. Like a complex mosaic, 
the whole of a man's nature is built up of contributions 
from parents and grandparents and other ancestors. 
The child is a chip of the old block, — the average of 
the stock from which he springs. A good nature may 
be half-hidden under acquired ugliness ; a bad nature 
may be nurtured into self-control and repression ; on 
either side there is great plasticity ; but the real stuff 
is only changeable slowly by organic variation. 

In a sense, of course, all this is an old story, but 
the modern note is that we cannot regard the inheri- 

58 






A Biological Approach 

tance as a legacy to a metaphysically abstracted heir ; 
the inheritance is or constitutes the heir. Rightly 
or wrongly, it is not congruent with the biological 
position to suppose that at a certain point in develop- 
ment, the soul steps in to put its shoulders under the 
yoke of the inheritance. To make an antithesis be- 
tween the inheritance and what a preacher quaintly 
called, " the ego behind the personality," seems im- 
possible. Whatever we think the word "sour' to 
mean, it cannot be intruded into the unity of the 
heritage. It is implicit within it from the first, a 
slumbering potentiality, part and parcel of the in- 
herited organisation. But if the individual is the 
product of his ancestry, a transient whirlpool in the 
stream of life, a mosaic of hereditary contributions 
from many forbears, a chip of the old block, a detach- 
able pendant on the eternal bead-string of germ-cells, 
and altogether predetermined, who can praise him, 
who can blame him, this child of the ages? In what 
sense is he master of his fate or arbiter of his destiny? 
In what sense is he responsible, a free agent, this 
product whose yea and nay have been as rigorously 
predetermined as his stature? 

What has the biologist to say? Little more than 
this, that, well-fated, or ill-fated, each living creature 
is born a new creature — an individuality. There is 
variation as well as continuity, and the mould is, so 
to speak, broken each time. The result may be a 
monster, a mediocrity, or a masterpiece, with the 
chances always in favour of mediocrity, but in any 
case, each new creature is a new creature. And in 
the case of man, this seems to imply a personality 

59 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

with a will of its own to this extent, that it may or 
may not use possibilities of nurture in a manner quite 
unpredictable. The radius of freedom of choice may 
be long or short, but there is some freedom, some- 
thing unpredictable in the activity of each new child. 
It may deceive itself, happily or unhappily, as to the 
length of its tether, but some freedom is born with it 
just because it is something new. What this small 
or large measure of freedom may involve, depends 
mainly on the variety of stimuli which reach the 
organism during its development. In short, the fact 
of variability has to be set against that of continuity, 
and the plastic power of environment against the per- 
sisting power of natural inheritance. 

What the theologian has to say may be best il- 
lustrated by a quotation from Prof. James Denny's 
recent work on " The Atonement and the Modern 
Mind." " All life is one, biologists argue. It rises 
from the same spring, it runs the same course, it 
comes to the same end. The life of man is rooted in 
nature, and that which beats in my veins is an inheri- 
tance from an immeasurable past. It is absurd to 
speak of my responsibility for it, or of my guilt 
because it manifests itself in me, as it inevitably does, 
in such and such forms. . . . How are we to appre- 
ciate this mode of thought? We must point out, I 
think, the consequence to which it leads. If a man 
denies that he is responsible for the nature which he 
has inherited, — denies responsibility for it, on the 
ground that it is inherited, — it is a fair question to 
ask him for what he does accept responsibility. When 
he has divested himself of the inherited nature, what 

60 



A Biological Approach 

is left? The real meaning of such disowning of 
responsibility is, that a man asserts that his life is a 
part of the physical phenomena of the universe, and 
nothing else ; and he forgets, in the very act of mak- 
ing the assertion, that if it were true, it could not 
be so much as made. The merely physical is tran- 
scended in every such assertion ; and the man who has 
transcended it, rooted though his life be in nature, 
and one with the life of the whole and of all the past, 
must take the responsibility of living that life out, 
on the high level of self-consciousness and morality 
which his very disclaimer involves." 

C. The Evolution Theory. The general idea of evo- 
lution, which is fast becoming an organic element in 
all our thinking, is not in any way peculiar to biology, 
though it has been most worked with and best justi- 
fied in this sphere. The general doctrine of organic 
evolution states that the plants and animals now 
around us are the results of natural (scientifically 
analysable) processes of growth and change, of sift- 
ing and singling, working throughout the ages, that 
the forms we see are the descendants of ancestors on 
the whole somewhat simpler, that these are descended 
from yet simpler forms, and so on backwards, till we 
lose our clue in the unknown — but doubtless momen- 
tous — vital events of pre-Cambrian ages, or, in other 
words, in the thick mist of life's beginnings. This 
theory has been slowly evolved, gaining content as re- 
search furnished fuller illustration, and gaining clear- 
ness as criticism forced it to keep in touch with facts. 
It has been slowly developed from the stage of sug- 
gestion to the stage of verification ; from being an 

61 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

a priori anticipation, it has become an interpretation 
of nature ; and from being a modal interpretation, it 
is advancing to the rank of a causal theory. 

What does the theory of organic evolution imply? 
(i) It presupposes in some form or other an order of 
nature to start with, — for the more ambitious, a 
nebula or an earth without form and void, or for 
most of us some primitive protoplasts gliding in a 
quiet pool. It cannot evolve a cosmos out of hope- 
less chaos, or out of nothing. It must be granted a 
primeval germ, originating it does not know how. 
Thus to some extent it postulates a pre-established 
order of nature. (2) It reveals more and more fully 
a natural and necessary history, scientifically con- 
ceivable, without " supernatural " intrusions, one world 
evolving of itself 'in the same sense that a seed or an 
egg develops of itself. (3) It discloses what must 
on the whole be called an undeniable progress, from 
the apparently simple to the obviously complex, with 
increasing differentiation and integration, towards 
more and more perfect. adaptiveness or fitness, more 
and more fulness of expression, greater and greater 
freedom from the grip of the environment, and ever 
completer unfolding or liberation of the psychical life. 

There are many questions which the theologian 
may pertinently ask in regard to the evolution 'theory. 
(1) What of "the mist of life's beginnings"? what 
of the vital order of nature? is it not simpler and 
franker to recognise the doctrine of creation to the 
extent of saying that God created the primitive proto- 
plasts? To ask this of a man is reasonable, but not 
of a biologist as such, who has no scientific data 

62 



A Biological Approach 

bearing on the subject. 1 (2) Again, the theologian 
may ask the biologist if he thinks that his theory of 
evolution really gets rid of the teleological idea by 
showing, for instance, how the wonderful adaptations 
in which animal nature is so rich have historically 
come about. It was Romanes who said : " Wherever 
we tap organic nature, it seems to flow with purpose," 
and every naturalist will agree — if the word seems 
be underlined and if the word " purpose " be put in 
inverted commas. What we actually observe is fit- 
ness, and that fitness remains as real as before, when 
we have succeeded in showing how it came to be. 
In the end we are forced back to regarding effective 
adapting response to the order of nature as a primary 
quality of the primeval protoplasm ; and even if that 
was selected out from stuffs which were non-adaptive, 
the primitive adaptability must simply come in a little 
further back. To show that the history of a thing 
affords an interpretation of its present fitness, which 
is what biology is continually doing, and to interpret 
phases of the history in the light of the finished pro- 
duct, is scientific teleology. " There is a wider tele- 
ology," Huxley wrote, " which is not touched by the 
doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon the 
fundamental proposition of evolution." But what 

1 " It is very desirable," Huxley repeatedly said, " to re- 
member that evolution is not an explanation of the cosmos, but 
merely a generalised statement of the method and results of that 
process. And, further, that, if there is any proof that the 
cosmic process was set agoing by any agent, then that agent 
will be the creator of it and of all its products, although super- 
natural intervention may remain strictly excluded from its 
further course.' * 

63 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

transcendental inference is to be drawn from the fact 
of fitness, what " the argument from design " really 
proves, is not for the biologist to say. (3) Another 
question, cognate to the last, is: Does the evolu- 
tion-process as it now proceeds, and as it has pro- 
ceeded through the unthinkable millions of years, 
whose graveyards are all we can know, reveal to the 
biologist any plot, any strategy? Is it true that 
through the ages an increasing purpose runs? or 
does the biologist imagine organic evolution as a con- 
catenation of chance episodes, chapter after chapter 
of happy accidents? Our answer is that the evolu- 
tion-process seems like a development-process, orderly 
and progressive ; that there have been catastrophes, 
crises, " chance-hits " in the former, just as there are in 
the latter, but that on the whole the process reads 
like a story of growth, like the working out of a big 
idea. The evolution-theory has been libelled as an 
attempt to re-instate " the old Pagan goddess, 
Chance," but Huxley and Darwin cannot have failed 
to convince serious students that by " chance " 
and " fortuitous " events, they meant no more than 
events of whose causes they were ignorant. Nowa- 
days, moreover, " chance " has been subjected to 
very careful study, and turns out to be one of the 
most orderly phenomena in the universe ! (4) The 
theologian has also every right to say to the evolu- 
tionist : Your modal formula commends itself to you, 
and to us ; evolution really seems to have been the 
method of the world's becoming ; but tell us frankly 
how far you have got on in raising the modal formula 
to the rank of a causal theory? Supposing evolution 

64 



A Biological Approach 

be a fact, what of the factors in the process? There 
is variability supplying the raw materials of progress ; 
there is modifiability directly affected by environ- 
mental influence ; there is heredity conditioning 
transmission or non-transmission ; there is the struggle 
for existence, the outcome of which is natural selec- 
tion or discriminate elimination, and a survival of the 
relatively more fit; and, finally, there are all the 
forms of isolation which limit the range of mutual 
fertility. But are these factors proving themselves 
sufficient? Has not one of the leaders written an 
essay " On the unknown factor in evolution "? 

The biologist's answer should indicate the bigness 
of the concepts, — variation, modification, selection, 
isolation, — and that we are far from having ex- 
hausted their scope ; that the discovery of any new 
factor scientifically expressible will be welcomed; 
and that serious aetiology is not yet fifty years old. 
The formulae work well, but there may be other 
formulae ; the evolution-theory is itself in process of 
evolution. But while there is much dispute and un- 
certainty as to the relative values of the various 
factors, the general fact of evolution becomes ever 
clearer. It may not be capable of rigid demonstra- 
tion, like the conservation of energy, but we know of 
no fact contradictory to it, of no lock in which its 
master-key does not turn. 

D. Biological Doctrine of Man. Biology reveals 
man as corporeally affiliated to a simian stock, as of 
great antiquity, as once much less perfect, and yet 
as the climax (as regards brains) of a long evolu- 
tionary process. We do not know when he emerged 
5 65 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

as such, but it is a moderate estimate to suggest half 
a million years ago. We do not know whence he 
emerged, but it seems just to reject any interpretation 
which denies his structural affiliation to some ape-like 
type. No one dreams of arguing that man is descended 
from any living form of ape ; but at what point the 
human stock diverged from the simian remains quite 
obscure. Man has his structural peculiarities, of 
course, from his chin to his heel ; but the great gap 
between man and other living creatures is in brain- 
development, in mental life, — in his language, reason, 
and morality, expressed at so many different levels 
along an inclined plane. Nor do we know how man 
arose; for in spite of acute suggestions as to the im- 
portance of the enlarged brain, the erect attitude, the 
use of the hands, the family life, the prolonged in- 
fancy, the formation of an external heritage, and so 
on, it must be admitted that the factors of the evolu- 
tion of man partake largely of the nature of may-be's 
which have no permanent position in science. Thus it 
happens that while we do not know when, or whence, 
or how Man emerged, we yet regard him as a natural 
product of the evolutionary process, because the 
cumulative evidence is so strong against making him 
" the great exception." It is unthinkable that the 
evolution-process should break down at the finish. 

It must be noted here that Darwin's magnanimous 
collaborateur, the Nestor among biologists, the doyen 
of Evolution-theory now that Spencer has gone, does 
not agree with his brethren in regarding Man as a 
natural product of evolution. Alfred Russel Wal- 
lace does not believe that the known factors are 

66 






A Biological Approach 

adequate to account for Man's higher qualities, for 
example, the artistic and moral faculties, and he 
concludes that these must have had another mode of 
origin, apart from the normal evolutionary process. 
They are things apart, for which " we can only find 
an adequate cause in the unseen universe of spirit." 
He says the same in regard to the origin of life and 
the emergence of consciousness ; and of course no 
biologist knows how to solve these riddles, or can 
object to the veteran holding any view he pleases in re- 
gard to them. But when it comes to separating off cer- 
tain qualities of man, — mathematical, musical, artistic, 
and moral, — and saying that these cannot be products 
of natural evolution, we must enter a respectful pro- 
test. It is giving up the problem prematurely, and 
without exhausting the scope of the known factors. 
It is an abandonment of the scientific position, and 
suggestive of a somewhat quaint dualism, to suppose 
that " spiritual influences " are ready at hand to help 
natural evolution over stiles of difficulty. It has to 
be remembered, however, that Wallace has had 
spiritualistic experiences which have convinced him 
that scientific analysis is leaving out an important 
set of factors. 

The biological doctrine of man is still young and 
incipient, very indefinite still as to the when, whence, 
and how of his emergence ; but the whole tendency 
of research is in favour of regarding him as part and 
parcel with the rest of creation. The value of a 
Shakespeare, a Newton, a Goethe is not lessened by 
the fact that each was once a simple child, and be- 
fore that a minute corpuscle of living matter, and 

6 7 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

the same holds true in regard to man's evolution. 
He has no reason to be ashamed of his ancestry, 
and, in any case, it does not affect his value. But 
the difficulty is to reconcile the biological interpreta- 
tion with the theological doctrine of man " made in 
the image of God," yet with that of " The Fall " ; 
and here, then, we give place to the theologian. Let 
him restate these conceptions in our idiom by all 
means, if he can; let him at any rate explain them 
to us anew in that of his own times, and not simply 
repeat them in the phraseology of the past. We 
realise of course that this is what he aims at; but we 
do not yet know with any sufficient clearness what 
his modern re-statement may be. 

E. Ethical Aspect of Organic Evolution. Very 
vital to our discussion is the question whether any 
judgment can be formed as to the ethical aspect of 
the general process of organic evolution, which lies 
before us as a sort of object-lesson in progress. If 
elimination in the struggle for existence be nature's 
sole formula of progress, how are we to think of this 
in relation to our own human development? 

In regard to this question four positions are held. 
First, there are those who simply accept the conven- 
tional Darwinian view, and use it to justify a laissez- 
faire policy. Secondly, there is the position of those 
who, so to speak, give Nature up, who hear in her 
many voices no helpful word to man in his endeavour 
after better-being. Thus Professor James in his lec- 
ture " Is life worth living?" proclaims the bank- 
ruptcy of Natural Theology, and finds in Nature 
"no universe," but a " multiverse," all plasticity and 

68 



A Biological Approach 

indifference, a "harlot" and "mere weather." It is 
said that science is never more than a broken mirror 
which philosophy reunites ; if so, we cannot but hope 
that the above conclusion, which is contrary to our 
whole view of the evolution-process, is not a good 
sample of philosophical mending. Thirdly, there is 
the view which Huxley stated in his well-known 
Romanes lecture, that ethical progress for man de- 
pends upon his combating the cosmic process, and 
rising above the struggle for existence. We must 
look for no moral support from the vast " gladiatorial 
show " of nature ; we must rather set our face against 
hers, and try to reverse her methods. 

Huxley said that well-doing has only as much 
natural sanction as ill-doing, for both are products 
of natural evolution. Just in the same way it may 
be said that disease has been evolved pari passu with 
vigorous health, and therefore has as much natural 
sanction. The facts, however, contradict this view; 
for Nature pronounces verdict on the diseased by 
eliminating them, in spite of all our efforts (some- 
times perhaps anti-evolutionary) to save. 

Huxley indicated that the thief and the murderer 
follow nature as much as the philanthropist. But we 
doubt this, since they pursue a course which often 
ends in their elimination. The bay-tree of the wicked 
may seem to be an evergreen, yet it does die down. 
There is little crime or anti-social conduct in the 
animal world; it is a contradiction in terms. 

If we make a curve of the ascent of vertebrates, 
marking their positions according to the degree of 
brain-development (which is generally a reliable in- 

6 9 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

dex of individuation), we find that as the curve 
ascends the ordinates of marital affection, parental 
care, mutual aid, and gentler emotions generally, 
are on the whole heightened step by step. That 
organisms so endowed should survive in spite of the 
admitted egoistic competition that is rife, is nature's 
sanction. The earth is the abode of the strong, but 
it is also the home of the loving. 

It appears, then, that an outlook on Nature's regime 
or strategy suggests to some merely a laissez-faire 
acquiescence — a trustful reliance on the effective- 
ness of the selection-process ; to others that there is 
no guidance at all to be had from this " harlot " 
Nature, who happens to be our mother; to others 
that the secret of man's progress is to try to reverse 
Nature's strategy. But is there not room for an en- 
deavour to diminish the self-confidence of the acqui- 
escence, the pessimism of aloofness, the antinomy of 
suggested reversal, by a fresh appeal to Nature ? We 
think there is. We cannot, however, enter here upon 
the long argument which is needed to do justice to 
this position; only an outline can be attempted. 

From the time of Empedocles, who recognised two 
ultimate forces in nature, Love and Hate, down to 
Herbert Spencer, who has insisted on altruism as 
well as egoism in Nature, there have been attempts 
to see nature as a materialised ethical process; and 
our sympathies are with this endeavour. " From the 
dawn of life," Spencer said, " altruism has been no 
less essential than egoism." " Self-sacrifice is no less 
primordial than self-preservation." Similarly, the es- 
says of Fiske, our own " Evolution of Sex," Drum- 

70 






A Biological Approach 

mond's " Ascent of Man," Coe's book on " Natural 
Selection," Kropotkin's essays on " Mutual Aid," 
have sought to emphasise what may be called in 
general terms the altruistic aspects of life. 

The point is whether the conventional Darwinian 
appeal to Nature can claim completeness. Have we 
not been too readily content with projecting upon 
Nature the social theory of a competitive mechanical 
and military age ? To many of us it seems that there 
was too much red in the picture which Darwin 
painted; yet it should be remembered that, at his 
best at least, he defined the struggle for existence, 
which he used " in a wide or metaphorical sense," in 
such wise as to include mutual dependence of organ- 
ism upon organism, and the efforts made for the sake 
of the young. The trouble is that Darwin's caution 
has not always been maintained, and certainly not 
always imitated, and that his picture has been re- 
produced by cheap or coarser processes until it has, 
in the hands of some, lost both subtlety and truth, 
and become a harsh and ugly print of Nature as " a 
continuous Waterloo," " a dismal cockpit," a " vast 
gladiatorial show." This is not merely bad as a piece 
of unbalanced cosmogony ; the worst of it is that, by 
a vicious circle, the libel projected upon Nature is 
brought back again to justify one set of human 
methods, the egoistic; to discredit others, the altru- 
istic ones. 

In correction of this it has been urged by the 
authors above-mentioned that organic progress de- 
pends on much more than a squabble round the 
platter, that the struggle for existence is far more 

7i 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

than an internecine struggle at the margin of subsis- 
tence, that it includes all the multitudinous efforts of 
self and for others between the poles of hunger and 
love, all the endeavours of mate for mate, of parent 
for offspring, of kin for kin. Love and life are factors 
in progress as well as pain and death ; the struggle 
for existence is often in part an endeavour after well- 
being made by socially-bound or kin-bound organisms 
in a social environment ; the premium on teeth and 
claws, on beaks and talons, is not greater than that 
on the warm solicitude of the maternal heart or the 
patience of the brooding bird. That the altruism may 
be quite instinctive does not seem to us to affect the 
present issue. Species-regarding is species-regarding 
still, so far as the biologist is concerned. He cannot 
enter upon the casuistry of conscious motive. 

It does not seem desirable to try to make out an 
undue dualism in Nature's process, — any opposition 
between the struggle for existence and the altruistic 
struggle. At its best, the formula, the " struggle for 
existence," includes all. Thus conceived with Darwin 
at his best, it is both competitive and non-competitive, 
conscious and unconscious, self-regarding and species- 
regarding, egoistic and altruistic. It occurs between 
the living and the not-living, between fellows, between 
foes, between the sexes, between the parts of an 
organism, between the germ-cells themselves, and 
even between the living particles that compose these 
cells. In other words, the struggle for existence is 
a convenient formula for a certain aspect of life, 
applicable whenever or wherever effectiveness of 
vital response is of critical moment. 

72 






A Biological Approach 

Thus, as we have elsewhere indicated in detail, we 
escape from the conception that progress depends 
primarily upon internecine struggle for existence, — 
that is, the subordination of the species to the indi- 
vidual; and we insist even more strongly upon that of 
the individual to the maintenance of the species, in 
sex, offspring, and society. Thus our ethical difficulty 
at length disappears, since the greater steps of ad- 
vance in the organic world compel us to interpret the 
general scheme of evolution as primarily a materialised 
ethical process, underlying all appearance of a glad- 
iatorial show. We have not to pit our little selves 
against the cosmic process, but to follow along those 
lines of the cosmic process which have made for the 
highest evolution. We see that it is possible to inter- 
pret the ideals of ethical progress — through love 
and sociality, co-operation and sacrifice, not as mere 
Utopias contradicted by experience, but as the highest 
expressions of the central evolutionary process of 
the natural world. As evolutionary biologists we are 
thus practically with moralist and theologian, even with 
poet or sentimentalist if you will, against " the vulgar 
economist " of Ruskin, or the self-styled " practical 
politician " of to-day. 

II. Ideals of Biology 

We have said enough to show that while no stretch 
of the imagination will enable us to say that the biol- 
ogist and the theologian are at present seeing eye to 
eye, the divergence is needlessly exaggerated by for- 
getting the essential differences in their aims and 

73 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

methods, " faith" and "science" being expressions of 
quite distinct moods. There is no utility in opposing 
biological and theological formulae, for they are in- 
commensurables. The point is whether they can be 
unified in personal and social experience, held together 
in a synthesis which is more than biology and more 
than theology. This seems more possible than it 
once was, but there is no doubt that some serious 
difficulties remain which cannot be overcome without 
more mutual re-adjustment of opinions than seems at 
present feasible. It is idle to pretend that the bio- 
logical doctrine of man squares well with its theolog- 
ical analogue, and the incongruities are not wholly 
due to the fact that science works with empirical, and 
faith with transcendental formulae, but partly to a 
disagreement in regard to the facts of the case. As 
the facts are, of course, the same for both sides, if 
they could only be seen aright by both, there is no 
reason to doubt that the harmonising process already 
begun will continue to progress. At present, how- 
ever, there are, we maintain, a number of conclusions 
on both sides which cannot be hurriedly abandoned, 
which cannot, however, be mutually accepted. There 
is no use crying " Peace, peace," when there is no 
peace; the solution must come about by growth, 
which will be promoted by an increased recognition 
of what is common in the ideals at least of the two 
outlooks. We propose, therefore, to devote the last 
section of this essay to a brief consideration of the 
ideals of biology. 

(a) Intellectual. Like any other science, Biology 
has for one of its ideals to gain a clear, orderly, cor- 

74 



A Biological Approach 

related, and interpretable view of nature. It analyses 
and pulls things and systems of things to pieces, but 
only as a means to an end, in order sooner or later 
to put them together again unified in intelligence. 
Many a chaotic corner is acquiring a semblance of 
rational order, many a puzzling obscurity has been 
illumined, many unsuspected linkages, correlations, 
and affiliations have been discovered. The vision of 
the web of life becomes clearer year by year, and 
though the progress towards a coherent system of 
conceptual formulae in which to express what we are 
discovering of its pattern seems asymptotic, it is real. 
The world of life, so bafflingly heterogeneous, is 
being revealed as a universe, not a mere multiverse; 
we are finding out the laws of the great kaleidoscope 
which we call animate nature ; we are slowly discover- 
ing the strategy as well as the tactics of evolution ; 
we are getting at the plot of the great drama. Every- 
where, unities are being perceived, — the unity of 
vital organisation through all the varied styles of 
architecture in plant and animal, the unity of vital 
processes amid all the multifarious expressions of 
life, the unity of development, the unity of evolution. 
What the poet and the artist see instinctively, what 
the metaphysician and the theologian reach deduc- 
tively, biology is striving to establish inductively, — 
the Unity of Nature. Truly, the ideal is very far from 
realisation, but every year sees some corner of the 
picture filled in. In a true sense, biology is thus 
approaching one aspect of the theologian's idea of 
God. 

(b) Emotional. Though science is not in itself 
75 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

emotional, being supposed to be purely intellectual, 
its ideal has an emotional aspect, for accurate know- 
ledge is incomplete without good feeling and right 
conduct. This world is not a stony sphinx, but a 
throbbing life, which to know is to love. It must be 
granted that the man of dominantly scientific mood 
goes on with his business of making the world trans- 
lucent, not primarily that emotion may be thrilled by 
the glimmer of the indefinable light that shines 
through, but because of his inborn inquisitiveness, 
his repugnance to obscurities, his craving for an 
intellectual system in which phenomena are provi- 
sionally unified. But he cannot help feeling all the 
time that he is working at a picture which will not 
merely inform but gladden the eyes. In short, he 
agrees with the theologian that his " chief end " in- 
cludes enjoying as well as knowing, as the Shorter 
Catechism puts it. 

It may be granted, too, that science, like a child 
pulling a flower to bits, is apt — and biology is one 
of the worst of the offenders — to dissect more than 
it constructs, and to lose in its analysis the vision of 
unity and harmony which the artist has ever before 
his eyes. Perhaps, however, if the artist has patience, 
he would often find that science restores the unity 
with more significance and more beauty in it than it 
had before. As biology passes from the structural, 
the morphological point of view, to the functional, the 
physiological one, as it escapes from the static to 
the kinetic, as it returns from the formal to the vital, 
when it resumes both these contrasted aspects of 
organic unity in the study of development and evolu- 

7 6 



A Biological Approach 

tion, it condones its destructive analysis by showing 
that things are more wondrously, beautifully, intensely 
alive, than even Pan-zoism suspected. In this pro- 
cess of renewal, this return from formalism, as kindred 
papers in this volume point out, sociology has much to 
say, education yet more to do. The partial pursuit of 
certain paths may sometimes dull or even play false 
to healthy emotion, but the general result and ideal of 
biology is to deepen our wonder in the world, our 
love of beauty, our joy in living. The modern botan- 
ist is in a very real sense more aware of the Dryad in 
the tree than the Greek could be. Our point is that 
biology, by its revelation of the mystery, wonder, and 
beauty of life, its intricacy and subtlety, its history, 
its tragedy and comedy, approaches another aspect 
of the Idea of God. 

(c) Practical. Although science is not in itself 
practical, any more than artistic or emotional, there 
is a practical note in its ideal. Knowledge for knowl- 
edge's sake is not a humanly satisfying motive, though 
the idea often fills the horizon for an hour, or a day, 
a year, or a life-time, according to the nature of the 
man. Comte's great aphorism, " Savoir pour pre- 
voir, prevoir pour pourvoir," is, on the whole, a no 
less accurate appreciation of the ideal of biology as 
it is of that of the physical or the social sciences. 

It must be remembered that man's first relations 
with Nature were doubtless predominantly practical, 
that not only many sciences have their roots in prac- 
tical lore, but that fresh vigour still often comes to 
science by a tightening of its contact with the affairs 
of daily life. We need hardly instance such a signal 

77 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

example as Pasteur, for it has been more or less 
obvious through the whole of history that science is 
most progressive when it recognises — consciously or 
sub-consciously — that science is for life, not life for 
science. At the same time, we cannot even for a 
moment allow that a science, as a science, should 
ever submit to the practical man's judgment, almost 
necessarily short-sighted, which makes immediate util- 
ity the criterion of worthiness. Over and over again, 
it has been shown that lines of scientific research, ap- 
parently abstract and remote from human life, have 
been in their practical issue most momentous, even 
revolutionary. " Vulcan, the god of industry, wooed 
science in the form of Minerva, but the chaste god- 
dess never married, although she conferred upon 
mankind nearly as many arts as Prometheus." 

That biology is increasingly justifying itself by 
practical works, no one can question who knows its 
contributions in relation to health and disease, the 
supply of food and other necessaries, the utilisation 
of plants and animals, and so forth. Moreover, it 
affords an educational discipline, the practical value 
of which is only beginning to be appreciated ; and it 
tends to remove obscurities which, if unillumined, 
would at least impede, if not mislead, human progress 
along practical lines. 

Most of all, however, would we emphasise the fact, 
that biology has, at least partially, formulated certain 
general conceptions of life and health, of growth 
and development, of order and progress, — centred 
in the evolving idea of Evolution, — which are not 
only attempts to see more clearly what is true, but 

78 



A Biological Approach 

which make for the ascent of man, the betterment 
of life. 

This aspect of the biological ideal might be devel- 
oped at length; but we venture to submit without 
further evidence our third proposition under this head, 
that biology in revealing possibilities of betterment, 
of saving, strengthening, regenerating men, again 
approaches another aspect of the Idea of God. 

So far then, for the present, we may go with this 
attempted contribution towards a better understand- 
ing between theologian and evolutionist. Are we 
suggesting that biology, with all its approved place in 
positive synthesis, is less irreconcilably removed even 
from traditional theology than may have seemed? 
its return to the fold, of natural theology at least, less 
hopeless? Or perhaps rather that the development 
of the theologian, and of theology itself may be rec- 
ognised as the continual endeavour to express and 
symbolise, for the individual and for the race, the 
mystery, the process, the ecstasy, the agony, the 
progress, and the ideals of Life? It is something if 
the controversy thus emerge anew, cleared of some 
past misunderstandings, and open for a discussion in 
which each seeks to take the other at his best. Their 
struggle may, indeed must, long continue, yet increas- 
ingly upon a higher plane, a rising wave, an ascend- 
ing spiral — that of the Culture of Existence; and 
this as a process not of thought merely, be it of natu- 
ralist or symbolist, but of Action ; one expressed 
therefore not merely in doctrine but in Life. Their 
initial contrast of mental attitudes, their divergences 

79 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

therefore of interpretation also, must correspondingly 
develop respective aspirations and policies of individ- 
ual influence and of social guidance, yet these with 
less sectarian dispute, with more personal meditation, 
more promotion of the human weal. This great old 
controversy then, with its mutually exclusive for- 
malists, we are thus beginning to see as a passing 
scene, a phase of a larger drama, of which each is 
but an awakening spectator, a stumbling actor, — 
that of the birth, the struggle, the death, yet the 
renewal and ascent of the Ideal in Evolution. Thus 
biological science must indeed become the handmaid 
of religion, as the theologian, again thinker and sym- 
bolist, can offer her the interpretation of Life. 

J. ARTHUR THOMSON. 
PATRICK GEDDES. 



80 



A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH 

PROFESSOR JOHN H. MUIRHEAD, M. A. 

Professor of Philosophy > University of Birmingham 

THE quarrel which Plato was the first to name 
between Poetry and Philosophy — between 
the claim to affinity with the world around us as with 
a larger self, and the attempt to verify in detail the 
foundations on which it rests — may be said to be 
the cause celkbre of man's intellectual history. It 
repeats itself under different forms in different ages, 
the intelligent jury who are the leaders of public 
opinion swaying now to this side and now to that as 
the verification has seemed more or less remote. In 
our own time it has assumed the form of a conflict 
between Religion and Science. During the eight- 
eenth and the greater part of the nineteenth century, 
the evidence seemed to be gradually massing itself in 
favour not only of a verdict of " not proven/' but of 
an interdict to all attempt at proof. Religion, like 
poetry, of which it is the finer spirit, has its roots 
in the felt affinity between our purposes and ideals 
and the general course of Nature, — the response of 
the real world to the deepest needs of the soul. At 
its highest, it is, as Professor James says, an " enthu- 
siastic temper of espousal towards the universe ; " at 
its lowest, it is the conviction that " all is not vanity 
6 81 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

in this universe, whatever the appearances may sug- 
gest." Throughout the whole scale it represents so 
many variations of the theme, that the standard of 
reality is to be sought for, not in the shadows of sense, 
but in the mind's demand for some satisfying totality 
of experience. But it was just this belief in the 
ultimate kinship between the soul's ideals and the 
reality of the world that the prevailing philosophy of 
the last two centuries with its bias towards mechan- 
ical connexion seemed bent on rendering untenable. 

The mechanical explanation of the universe is not, 
of course, a modern discovery. The first sketch of 
the atomic theory, with its corollaries of the inde- 
structibility of matter and energy, was already before 
the world in the fifth century B. c, and by the end 
of the era it had been developed into a system of 
materialism as complete as any that has since been 
seen. What is characteristic of the modern form of 
the doctrine is, on the one hand, the reinforcement 
it seems to have received from a brilliant period of 
progress in every field of research, and, on the other, 
the theory of agnosticism as to the ultimate nature 
of reality with which in its leading representatives it 
has been combined. 

The first impulse towards the modern theory is 
traceable to Descartes. Descartes himself was a sup- 
porter of a spiritualistic conception of the world, but 
in two ways he opened the way to another interpre- 
tation of it. In agreement with Galileo, he laid the 
foundation of the modern view of motion as the all 
important reality of which matter is merely the vehi- 
cle. By teaching, further, that animals were auto- 

82 



A Psychological Approach 

mata, he suggested a theory of conscious life that was 
bound, sooner or later, to be extended. If animals 
were machines, why not man? was a burning question 
in the middle of the eighteenth century. 1 But it was 
not till the restatement of the atomic theory by Bosco- 
wich, and its application to chemistry by Dalton, fol- 
lowed by the formulation and experimental proof of 
the law of the Conservation of Energy in the middle 
of the nineteenth century, that the theory began to 
assume its modern form. This result was hastened by 
the discoveries of Bernard and Ludwig in physiology, 
of Darwin and Wallace in biology, and finally by the 
claim put forward by Comte and Mill from the side of 
psychology and sociology, by Buckle from the side 
of history and statistics on behalf of a science of 
human life and mind based upon rigid natural neces- 
sity. In view of these advances of the positive spirit, 
it is not surprising to find the middle of the nineteenth 
century like the middle of the eighteenth century 
only far more deeply marked by a widespread feeling 
that the key to the world of phenomena in every field 
was contained in the one fundamental assumption of 
the existence of matter and energy. This feeling 
found expression in a host of materialistic works of 
which Biichner's Force and Matter is probably the 
best known. 2 In England, this idea may be said to 
have come to a head and received its most trium- 
phant, if not its most carefully worded, statement in 

1 In 1748 La Mettrie published his book, the Human 
Machine. 

2 It is said to have run through sixteen editions in thirty 
years, and to have been translated into thirteen languages. 

83 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

Professor Tyndall's well-known address to the British 
Association in 1 874. " Trace the line of life backwards, 
and see it approaching more and more to what we 
call the purely physical condition. We come at 
length to the protogenes of Haeckel. Can we pause 
here? We break a magnet and find two poles in 
each of its fragments. And when we can break no 
longer, we prolong the intellectual vision to the polar 
molecules. Believing, as I do, in the continuity of 
Nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our micro- 
scopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the 
mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the 
eye. By an intellectual necessity I cross the bound- 
ary of the experimental evidence and discern in that 
Matter which we in our ignorance of its latent powers, 
and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its 
Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the 
promise and potency of all terrestrial Life." l 

In spite of the continuous scientific advance based 
upon the assumption of the unity of Nature and our 
ability to express the laws of material phenomena in 
one or two fundamental formulae, which has taken 
place since this celebrated pronouncement was made, 
the present day has witnessed a remarkable reaction 
against the mechanical interpretation of the phenom- 
ena of life and mind, and the religious agnosticism 
associated with it. Among the leaders of science 
themselves the confident tone of a generation ago 
has given place to a distrust of all claims to finality 
on behalf of scientific conceptions, accompanied by 

1 Address 1874, p. 55, condensed. 

84 



A Psychological Approach 

a renewed sympathy with ideas in their essence relig- 
ious. And, speaking generally, it is not too much to 
say that religion in the wider sense of the word exer- 
cises a stronger hold on the mind of the civilised 
world to-day than it has done at any period since the 
Reformation. 

While there can be little doubt as to the fact, there 
is less general agreement as to the cause of this sur- 
prising change. Probably, as in all complex move- 
ments, many influences have combined to produce it. 
With some who have lived through both of these 
phases, it is the outcome of practical experience, and 
the felt insufficiency of the formulae of jubilant ag- 
nosticism with which they started in life. With others, 
perhaps, it is the result of the enlargement of the in- 
tellectual horizon which a general sense of the un- 
limited possibilities of human discovery, whether in 
the field of nature or of mind, has brought with it. 
Whatever may be the cause, the main question that 
concerns philosophy is of the justification of the 
present religious reaction. Is it possible to find any 
solid ground for the belief that somehow or other the 
path to a more spiritual view of the world, which a 
generation ago seemed to be rapidly closing, has once 
more been reopened? The object of this paper is to 
point to the fact that in the field of life in general, 
and of the human mind in particular, the progress of 
thought has tended to show that mechanical law is 
of strictly limited application, and that, so far as psy- 
chology is concerned, the evidence points to the 
open door. 

I shall begin by stating more clearly than I have 
85 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

hitherto done what is to be understood by natural 
law. So long as natural law was conceived of 
vaguely as complete determination by antecedent 
conditions, and opposed to the free design of an 
artistic Creator, it is easy to understand the domi- 
nance it obtained. But the advance of science has 
meant not only the extension of the idea of physical 
causation to an ever-widening range of phenomena, 
but the deepening of the idea of what is meant by 
physical causation itself. Superficially, and as it is 
conceived of by popular thought, a cause stands for 
a thing operating upon another which is wholly inde- 
pendent of it. When one billiard ball strikes another, 
it is sufficient for ordinary purposes to say that it is 
the cause of the resulting motion. At a further stage 
of reflection, it is noted that the cause of an event 
is not a thing but a previous event or condition of 
things. And this, when more closely scanned, is 
seen to be resolvable into a number or system of 
such conditions. A cause, says Hobbes, is " the 
aggregate of all the accidents," and he is followed 
by Mill, when he defines a cause as " the sum of 
the conditions." By the time this stage has been 
reached, it has become obvious that one of the con- 
ditions is the reaction of that on which the cause 
is supposed to operate, and that the distinction 
between a cause and an effect, temporally divided 
from each other, except as phases of a single con- 
tinuous process, is more or less arbitrary. At this 
level, the motions of the billiard balls is explained in 
terms of a system of forces in which any distinction 
between cause and effect tends to disappear. A 

86 



A Psychological Approach 

further stage still is reached when the series of events 
represented by the cause and its effect is conceived 
of as the phenomenal aspect of a system of mutually 
acting and reacting particles in which alike the mate- 
rial substratum and the force or energy exerted by 
them is constant. What takes place in the billiard 
balls is a transference of energy in which the loss in 
the one is precisely equivalent to the gain in the other, 
and is expressible in a mathematical formula. While 
thus undergoing a process of refinement, it is doubt- 
ful whether our conception of mechanical causation 
ever wholly loses the traces of its more rudimentary 
forms, and whether these ought not rather to be re- 
garded as elements which it contains, than as phases 
through which it has passed. So interpreted, it may 
be said to imply : (V) the determination of an event 
by an antecedent different from itself, (£) the con- 
tinuity of the two events expressible as a transmission 
of energy, (c) the quantitative equivalence of the 
energies : " no energy is lost and the sum of energy 
is the same/' 

The materialistic theory of the universe assumes that 
the form of causation here described is the type to 
which each and every kind of phenomenon is ulti- 
mately reducible. It is true that before they can be 
taken as constituents of the universe, our billiard balls 
must be reduced by millions upon millions, and re- 
baptised first as atoms, then as electrons, perhaps by 
and by as something else. Further that their move- 
ments have to be conceived of as storable in the form 
of latent energy, as in the pendulum at the end of its 
swing, and again as transformable into molecular 

87 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

motion, as in heat or magnetism. But the underly- 
ing conception of quantitatively determinable masses, 
acting upon one another from without in definite, 
quantitatively determinable ways is the same as that 
described above. Returning therefore to our sub- 
ject, the question before us is of the extent to which 
recent advances in the sciences, other than those 
commonly classed as physical, has been in the direc- 
tion of the confirmation of the universal applicability 
of naturalistic explanation. 

On this question, as it concerns such science as 
Chemistry and Biology, an outsider can hardly 
venture to have opinion. Yet he may note the 
obstacles to mechanical explanation that are patently 
acknowledged by experts themselves. The success 
of the atomic theory in chemistry forms a brilliant 
record, and seems to contain a reliable promise of the 
ultimate and not very distant triumph of the mechani- 
cal theory in this department. But before acknowledg- 
ing the victory, we have to insist on the establishment 
of a clear continuity between what are understood as 
mechanical and chemical energies. In view of this 
requirement, laymen may be permitted to hesitate 
before the admission of experts that " deep-going 
changes take place at the entry of substances into 
chemical combination by reason of which the rela- 
tion of the qualities of a compound to those of its 
constituent parts can never be quite perspicuous." 

The difficulty already felt in chemistry increases as 
we pass to the phenomena of life. Recent observa- 
tions of bacillic forms seem to show that the impulse 
under which they act is of quite a different order from 

SS 



A Psychological Approach 

that of purely physical agents. They are sensitive to 
stimuli from their environment, direct themselves to 
food, avoid obstacles, and in other ways exhibit 
behaviour bearing a much closer analogy to human 
purposes than to physical energies. It is not merely 
that no case has been established for the genesis of 
the living cell from lifeless matter. No stress need 
be laid on the breakdown of the case for abiogenesis. 
Even though the evidence were stronger than it is, it 
would still be possible to maintain that it pointed 
rather to the existence of an element of sensitivity in 
what we now call lifeless matter, than to the origin of 
the sensitive from the insensitive. The point to be 
emphasised is that the living cell, at all stages of its 
development, from the lowest to the highest organ- 
isms, exhibits phenomena for the explanation of 
which the conception of constancy of energy in a 
system of material or ethereal particles is coming 
more and more to be recognised as inadequate. 
There seem, indeed, to be already signs of a curious 
reversal of the current of speculation. Instead of 
insisting upon atoms and energy as the Bed of Pro- 
crustes into which all phenomena must be forced to 
fit, the physicist seems on the point of recognising 
an inner principle of adaptation even in material 
particles hitherto regarded as subject only to influ- 
ences from without. 1 

Passing from facts usually classified as physical to 
those which are acknowledged to be psychical, we 
may begin by recalling the general attitude of the 

1 In connexion with this, the investigations of physicists on 
the " fatigue " of metals is suggestive. 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

earlier period. By some, the mind was frankly de- 
scribed as a " secretion " of the brain. Others sought 
to mitigate the harshness of such crude comparisons 
by assigning it a decorative function as an " epiphe- 
nomenon," standing to material process as the escape 
of steam or the flicker of light over a locomotive 
stands to the machinery, — a sign of real operations 
going on below, but without significance either as a 
cause or a guide of force and motion. But the gen- 
eral result was the same : mind was generally treated 
as an adjunct to the brain, either as another form, 
or as a function of molecular motion. 

There is no more striking change in the attitude of 
science at the present day than the recognition of the 
confusion underlying all such metaphors, and of the 
futility of the attempt to establish any real continu- 
ity between brain processes and mental experience, 
or any real analogy between physical and mental 
causation. 

I. With the disappearance of the idea of soul as 
a substance has gone the idea that its relation to the 
body can be at all adequately conceived of as that 
of one thing acting upon another. We experience 
things as substances external to one another: our 
own bodies, for instance, as outside the objects 
around them ; but in what intelligible sense can we 
say that our "experience," which is the most general 
term for our mind, is outside of the things it appre- 
hends? As well might we speak of the picture as 
outside the canvas, the form outside the marble. 
Of the things thus apprehended, the brain and its 
changes are a part: they only have meaning within 

90 



A Psychological Approach 

an experience, and it is merely a psychological 
" bull " to speak of them as external to it. 

A similar difficulty faces us from the side of the 
second of the aspects under which we viewed physi- 
cal causation, — continuity between cause and effect. 
A physiological movement — a change in the dis- 
position of the molecules of nerve and brain — may 
perhaps be said to be continuous with ethereal or 
atmospheric waves, but all trace of continuity seems 
to vanish when we pass from molecular movements 
to sensations of light and sound. We pass here 
from one world into another far more widely sepa- 
rated from it than is the most distant star in the 
deserts of space from our planet and the system to 
which it belongs. This has been admitted by the 
most consistent advocates of naturalism. " The pas- 
sage," writes Tyndall, " from the physics of the brain 
to the corresponding facts of Consciousness is un- 
thinkable." In spite of this admission, Tyndall, we 
have seen, believes in the ultimate reducibility of 
mental to atomic changes, and if the mere absence of 
intuitable continuity were the only difficulty in the 
way of assimilation, we might ignore it in view of what 
might be considered the overwhelming probability 
of the case. But other difficulties remain. 

The third requirement in physical explanation is 
measurement. In physical science there is here no 
difficulty in principle. A standard unit is a familiar 
conception. In psychical intensities, feelings, sensa- 
tions, efforts, the case is different. Here everything 
is fluid, everything relative. It is true that Fechner 
in the middle of last century conceived the hope of 

9* 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

establishing a law of quantitative equivalence be- 
tween the stimulus and the sensation, and the attempt 
has been persistently renewed from time to time. 
The controversy is surrounded with some technical 
difficulty, turning upon the question of the sense in 
which we can speak of quantity at all in relation to 
our feelings and sensations, but the balance of 
opinion among psychologists leans weightily to the 
side of abandoning as unmeaning the attempt to es- 
tablish a quantitative relation between the physical and 
the mental, and of substituting the well-recognised 
law of relativity for anything which has the remotest 
affinity with physical causation and the conservation 
of energy. 1 

So far, it may be admitted that the argument has, 
on the whole, been fatal to the application of the laws 
of mechanics, as we understand them in the physical 
sciences, to the phenomena of mind. But the " me- 
chanical philosophers " of our own day are not likely 
to accept such demonstration as disposing of the 
question. Granting it to have been proved that 
psychology is no subtle annexe of physics and me- 

1 That mental states have a quantitative aspect is clear. We 
speak of an intenser sensation of light or colour, of one plea- 
sure as greater than another. But when we seek to assign an 
exact meaning to these phrases, we are met with the insur- 
mountable difficulty of discovering any unit of measurement 
corresponding to the units of extension or number. As we pass 
from a whitish pink to a deep red, in what sense can we be 
said to be experiencing more units of redness ? Close analysis 
of such an experience seems to suggest, as Professor James ex- 
presses it, rather a sense of greater and greater distance from a 
limit than of more and more of the same sensation. 

92 



A Psychological Approach 

chanics, it may still be asked whether any step has 
thereby been gained towards the proof that it is a 
science of the spiritual, in any sense that can be of 
service to religion. Our ideas are not determined by 
physical movements, but if they can be shown to be 
the effect of previous ideas in such wise that their 
course, and the course of the conduct which results 
from them, is fixed as inevitably and (as we shall 
perhaps by and by discover) as calculably as the 
distribution of energy at any moment in a material 
system is determined by the previous distribution, 
what, it may be asked, has been proved ? what ground 
has been reclaimed from the reign of natural law that 
is worth referring to as a gain to religion? 

2. The answer to this contention brings us to the 
second and, for the subject of this paper, the more 
important of the generally accepted results of recent 
psychology. Psychologists in general admit that the 
idea of a mechanics of the mind not only has had a 
great history in the past, but within clearly defined 
limits is a perfectly legitimate one. But the day has 
gone past when these limits could be ignored, and it 
could be claimed that our mental life can be " ex- 
plained " by the laws of the association of ideas on 
the analogy of the physical sciences. No one has 
done more than Professor Munsterberg to develop a 
mechanics of the mind in the above sense, but no one 
has recognised more clearly or stated more power- 
fully the provisional and strictly limited application 
of such a psychology. After pointing out that mind 
is essentially will and purpose, Professor Miinster- 
berg goes on to show that in this sense it is not a 

93 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

perceivable object and therefore neither a cause nor 
an effect. The psychology that treats it as such 
" may be and in this century indeed has been the 
last word of a naturalistic attitude towards the world. 
But it degenerates into an unphilosophical psychol- 
ogism, just as natural science degenerates into mate- 
rialism, if it does not understand that it works only 
from one side and that the other side is the primary 
reality." Opposed to this is a psychology which 
insists that "we ought to abandon exaggerated devo- 
tion to the physical world, that we ought to look out 
for our inner world. A good psychology is the most 
important supplement to those sciences which con- 
sider the inner life not as an existing describable, 
explainable object, but as a will system to be inter- 
preted and to be appreciated. Psychology is an end 
as the last word of the naturalistic century which lies 
behind us ; it may become a beginning as the intro- 
ductory word of an idealistic century to be hoped 
for." 1 

Fully to develop the thought that underlies this 
passage would lead us into a discussion of the mod- 
ern doctrine of volition far beyond the limits of the 
present paper. The point at which this doctrine 
becomes of essential importance to our argument is 
the distinction which it establishes between physical 
processes, as a series of casually related events in 
time, and mental processes, at whatever stage of 
development we chose to take them, as the expres- 
sion of the permanent systems of ideas and senti- 

1 Psychology and Life, by Hugo Miinsterberg. 
94 



A Psychological Approach 

ments which we call the self. My sitting before the 
piece of paper on which I write these words is in a 
sense the outcome of my past life. Certainly if I 
had no past, I should have no present. But it is in 
a far truer sense the result of the interest I take in 
the subject under discussion, and in the means of 
expressing it. Voluntary action has been described 
as determination by the future as contrasted with 
physical action, or determination by the past. But 
the point that requires to be emphasised is rather 
that time sequence is here irrelevant. In volition I 
am not, strictly speaking, determined by any event 
at all. I am not acted upon, but I act under the 
sense of the value of the object to a self "whose 
borders," as has been finely said, " are washed by 
time," but which, as a whole, reflecting itself in its 
actions as a picture does in its parts, or an organism 
in its members, stands in a quite definite sense above 
all time sequence. This is somewhat obscured by 
the use of the term " motive," which is commonly 
taken in the sense of something external to the will. 
Reflection shows that our motives ought not to be 
conceived of as forces acting on the mind from with- 
out, but as deriving their efficacy from the response 
they meet with from the organised structure of the 
will, which we call our character. As a man sees 
only what he comes prepared to see, and therefore 
may already be said to have seen, so he is moved 
only by what he is prepared to accept as his motive 
and may already be said in a sense to possess or 
to be. 

The general result of the analysis, now generally 
95 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

accepted in psychology, that is here condensed is 
the vindication for the mind of a reality of its own, 
independent of the physical order. But if this were 
all, the reality thus claimed might still be held to be 
precarious, resting on our present ignorance of any 
method of co-ordinating the two worlds of mind and 
matter. At best, it might be said we have merely 
broken our world into two, assigning one part to the 
reign of natural law, the other to the freedom of 
choice. It leaves us with two worlds held apparently 
in some sort of equipoise, but with no discoverable 
centre of gravity, — no point from which their unity 
can be rendered intelligible. And if this be so, how- 
ever justifiable the refusal to acquiesce in material- 
ism, yet from the side of psychology at least, there 
seems no opening to the comprehensive view of the 
world resting on the priority of mind which we have 
seen to be the presupposition of religion. But the 
clue which psychological analysis places in our hand 
does not leave us here. It leads to a further step 
that is of fundamental importance in any attempt to 
take stock of present day intellectual tendencies. 
Any statement of it at this stage of a paper like the 
present must necessarily be condensed and unsatis- 
factory. What follows is intended merely as an in- 
dication of its general nature and bearing. For a 
fuller statement, the reader is referred to the treat- 
ment of the subject of the External World by the 
best psychologists of the present time. 1 

1 For example, Professor Stout's chapter on "The External 
World as Ideal Construction." Manual of Psychology, Bk. IV. 
c. VI. 

96 



A Psychological Approach 

Our result, so far, is that the attempt to explain 
the universe in terms of physical energy has brought 
to us a n y impasse. This suggests the question whether 
the attempt has not been a misguided one from the 
outset, and whether we might not have fared better, 
had we reversed the process and taken as our start- 
ing point, instead of the atomic structure of matter 
and the law of the conservation of energy, the struc- 
ture of our own wills and the system of ends of which 
consciousness in its essence consists. At a point in 
the development of astronomy, the world was invited 
by the heliocentric theory to reverse all its former 
ideas. Psychology has to-day arrived at conclusions 
which invite a similar reversal of customary modes 
of thinking. 1 In bare outline, the Copernican theory 
of the relation of mind and matter may be stated as 
follows : 

The characteristic of mental, as opposed to material 
action is that it is guided by purpose. After what 
has been said, we need not pause over this. Neither 
need we enter on the question of the ruling purpose 
of conscious beings. All are agreed that, for ordi- 
nary ends, it is sufficient to describe it as our own 
happiness or perfection. It is further unnecessary 
at this time of day to spend words in proving that 
human life, in its best representatives, whether indi- 
viduals or societies, means development of faculty, — 
the ever fuller expression of the powers and capabili- 
ties of human nature. But in proportion as we admit 
these conclusions, we seem also to be bound to admit 

1 Hegel defined philosophy in general as an invitation to 
stand upon our heads. 

7 97 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

that the law of human life, so far from being a law of 
conservation, is a law of constantly increasing energy 
— of increased efficiency. In this increase, called in 
leading articles " the march of civilisation," one of 
the most conspicuous factors is increased power over 
nature, as represented by our tools and machines, — 
in a word, by the whole labour-saving apparatus of 
life and the scientific ideas that have made them 
possible. The former of these we are accustomed to 
consider our own creations, and, in the strict sense, 
instruments for purposes that lie beyond them. We 
are accustomed, on the other hand, to think of our 
mathematical and physical conceptions as something 
given independently of human actions and the ends 
they serve. Yet, strictly speaking, they are essentially 
of the same character as these material tools, results 
of the same process of selection and construction. 
This has long been recognised by thinkers to be 
true of mathematical conceptions. The lines, circles, 
and uniform dimensions with which geometry deals 
are generally acknowledged to be ideal constructions 
to which nothing corresponds in the concrete world 
of our sense-experience. The definitions, axioms, 
propositions with which Euclid makes us familiar, 
are instrumental conceptions whose validity is guaran- 
teed to us by no independent existence, but by the 
extent to which they answer in experience to the 
demands we make upon them. So far, however, is 
the Euclidean system from being accepted as an 
expression of any absolute independent truth that it 
is asserted by some mathematicians to be merely one 
of many possible systems which, under other circum- 

98 



A Psychological Approach 

stances, might come to be regarded as of equal 
validity. 

But the arguments which apply to mathematical 
conceptions apply equally mutatis mutandis to those 
of physics. The uniform strains, pressures, energies, 
quantitative equivalents, atomic structures, with which 
science is upon so familiar terms, although they are 
suggested by sensory experience, are in no sense data 
of it, but are arrived at by the same process of selec- 
tion and idealising construction as are the uniform 
spaces and numerical series of mathematics. Like 
the latter, they are working conceptions, tools of the 
mind, keys, as they are often called, to the secrets of 
nature. So far as they serve the purpose and fit the 
lock, they are accepted by us as real. Where they 
fail to act or serve any useful purpose, as organising 
principles, we rightly speak of them as illusory and 
set them aside in favour of others. By this it is not 
of course meant that the orderly arrangement of 
events in their sequences is merely an idea in the 
mind of the investigator, that there is nothing ob- 
jectively real in matter, force, and energy. It is true 
that man has but recently made any considerable 
progress in reducing the complicated facts of nature 
to the simple expressions which are the counters of 
science in discovering, as we say, her laws. But the 
laws of nature antedated man's discovering mind : 
they are in no way dependent on it for their crea- 
tion. But what follows from this? Not that the 
real world, as we thus come to know it in science, 
exists as something that could ever become manifest 
to our sense-organs, but that as a system of thoughts 

99 

L.ofC. 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

it corresponds to our thoughts, and that in thus 
thinking it we are reproducing its intelligible pattern 
in ourselves. Kepler discovered the true — or at any 
rate the relatively true — concepts that explained the 
motions of the planets, but he did so in his own words, 
because God had had these thoughts before him, and 
he could thus think them " after Him." 

The conclusion to which all this points is that 
physical conceptions are keys which have been put 
into our hands for the interpretation of a definite 
order of facts. But as we have found or formed 
these for the purpose of rendering intelligible to our- 
selves and controlling one order, we may very well 
have to find or fashion others, where a different 
order of facts is concerned. This is the contention 
of the present paper. I have tried to show that such 
a " transition into another order " takes place when 
we pass from inorganic matter to life and mind, from 
the physical to the mental, from an abstracted ele- 
ment of our experience to our experience as a con- 
crete whole. We use a saw to make a fiddle ; we 
throw it aside when we come to play upon it. In 
somewhat the same way, we use the law of causation 
from without and the conservation of energy, when 
we seek to explain to our minds the material world; 
we have to look for some other conception when we 
come to the action of the mind itself. There is a 
theological heresy known in the prayer-book as that 
of " confounding the substances." The heresy in 
philosophy I have been trying to deal with is of 
somewhat the same kind. It is one that those who 
occupy themselves exclusively with physical phe- 

ioo 



A Psychological Approach 

nomena are especially prone to. As we have seen, 
it was widely spread in the seventies of last century, 
when for a moment leading scientists, to use Words- 
worth's prophetic description, became the 

" slaves 
... of that false Secondary Power 
By which we multiply distinctions, then 
Deem that our puny boundaries are things 
That we perceive and not that we have made." 

I have tried to show that our own time is marked 
by a different spirit. At the end of a period of 
unequalled success in physical science, indeed as a 
last phase of it, a wider intellectual horizon is open- 
ing out, in view of which the general truths of natural 
science are coming to be recognised, in the words of 
a pioneer in this field, as " themselves a sort of ele- 
ments or agents under processes subordinate helpers 
of the human mind." l This does not mean their 
degradation. On the contrary, it asserts their true 
dignity by assigning to them a place in the hierarchy 
of creative concepts in apprehending which the 
human mind reflects the divine. 

How precisely they do this, in other words, in what 
relation the human stands to the Universal Mind, 
which is the object of religion, it is not the work of 
psychology to explain. Psychology has done its 
work, so far as religion is concerned, in removing the 
difficulty that comes from the opposition of the physi- 
cal to the mental, and from the apparent secondari- 
ness of the latter in the order of creation. It remains 

1 Professor Royce, in The World and the Individual. 
101 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

for philosophy to lead us the further step, and show, 
as it may, that the purposes of humanity can only 
be rendered self-consistent and comprehensible when 
taken as part of a larger scheme which embraces 
and reconciles them. 

JOHN H. MUIRHEAD. 
Birmingham. 



102 



A SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH 
TOWARDS UNITY 

VICTOR V. BRANFORD, M.A. 

Honorary Secretary, The Sociological Society 
I 

TO the sociologist the relation of Religion and 
Science is a particular case of a more general 
one. In the first place, the relation may be one of 
conflict or co-operation, of antagonistic multiplicity or 
of unity, of mutual exclusion or of alternating opposi- 
tion and reconciliation. Whether it is viewed under 
one or more of these aspects, depends of course upon 
conditions of time and place, upon the mood or per- 
sonality of the investigator, and upon his method of 
investigation; it depends too upon the character of 
the individuals taken as representatives of religious 
and scientific interests, and also upon the definitions 
of those interests from which the investigator sets 
out. In the second place, the relation of Religion 
and Science is sociologically one amongst other 
cases of cultural differentiation, and the general study 
of these is surely a condition necessary to the under- 
standing of any particular one of them. 

As the naturalist thinks of animals not only as united 
into a " kingdom," but also as divided into more or less 

103 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

definable groups with distinctive characters common 
to the members of a given group, so the sociologist 
thinks of any given society not only as a social unity, 
but also as a whole divisible into social groups pos- 
sessing common group-interests. The sociologist's 
handling of Religion and Science thus begins by 
asking what social groupings are brought about by 
the interests called Religious and Scientific. Here 
the practical difficulties of the investigation at once 
come into view. Turn to the Census Reports, and 
you find that governments do not know how to ask, 
and the people do not know how to answer, ques- 
tions about either Religion or Science. 1 And the 
statisticians, who should instruct both the govern- 
ments and the people in these matters, are themselves 
slow to grow out of their sociological long-clothes, 
and apt to remain content with mathematical toys. 
Driven back on his own resources, the sociologist 
utilizes such material as the contemporary state of 
his own study affords. 

To identify Religion with Priestcraft is a fallacy 
surviving in popular thought from pre-sociological 
(notably eighteenth century) philosophy. Yet the 
sociologist may, without in any way committing him- 
self to that fallacy, utilize the element of truth that 
has caused it to be believed. That element of truth 
is briefly this: that where the study and the in- 
culcation of Religion is the occupation of a group 

1 The Australian census schedules ask the question : " What 
is your religion?" It is said that many people reply, quite 
truthfully, no doubt, " I don't know." Others, with admirable 
insight and candor, reply, " £. s. dP 

104 



A Sociological Approach 

of persons — the Priesthood — there is a tendency 
for religious interests to become differentiated from 
the social interests of the whole community. The 
Priesthood professes to represent the religious in- 
terests of the community, and at its best periods, and 
in the long run, doubtless does so with more or less 
completeness. But in the making of the constantly 
required adjustments and re-adjustments between 
group-interests and communitary interests, there must, 
in the nature of things, be endlessly repeated oppor- 
tunities for conflict and antagonism. The law of 
evolution, formulated by Hegel as a generalization 
from the Kantian categories, applies here as else- 
where — differentiation and integration alternating as 
correlative parts of a continuing process of spiral 
development. 

In addition to the Priesthood, other social groups 
arise and organise themselves, each representing some 
communitary interest. For the purpose of the pres- 
ent argument, and in application to the present phase 
of occidental civilisation, these other groups may per- 
haps be reckoned as follows : 1 

(i) Scientists; (4) Politicians; 

(2) Industrialists; (5) Historians; 

(3) Literary Men and Artists ; (6) Philosophers. 

And lest the more important half of Western 
Humanity be still unrepresented in the classification, 

1 This classification is borrowed, in a modified form, from 
one of the many unpublished sociological essays of Professor 
Geddes. Doubtless are derived from the same source more of 
the ideas in the text than the writer is aware of, and the latter 
are not few. 

io5 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

there should be added a seventh group, — that of 
women, — the Feminists. 

But, omitting the Feminist Group, for want of 
knowing whether it is sociologically equivalent to 
any one of the others or to all of them together, and 
awarding to Religion (for the present, without exam- 
ination) the central place it traditionally claims, the 
position might be diagrammatically represented thus : 




Notwithstanding the profession of social unity, it is 
manifest that in each case the Group-Interest is likely 
to be, under normal circumstances, more or less diver- 

106 



A Sociological Approach 

gent from the Communitary Interest, and that har- 
mony can only be approached by a process which 
implies a certain degree of conflict and sacrifice. 
The subdivision of thought and action, the speciali- 
sation of occupation and of leisure, have, amongst 
western nations, proceeded so far that the social 
groups enumerated above are substantially distinct 
collections of different individuals. The group boun- 
daries are, to be sure, in no case sharply defined. 
There are individuals common to two or more, or 
even to all of the groups. But this overlapping is 
not — even in the case of groups most nearly related 
— sufficient to insure a free passage and circulation 
of ideals from group to group. These ideals are com- 
plementary and harmonious, or exclusive and dis- 
cordant, according to circumstance. The larger the 
number of individuals at any one time whose thought 
and interest are effective in two, or three, or more 
groups, the more complementary and harmonious is 
likely to be the aggregate of group-ideals ; the fewer 
such men, the poorer, the more exclusive and antago- 
nistic the ideals of all. And this so, not merely be- 
cause of the contagion of ideas in the mingling of 
diverse individuals, but more especially because ideals 
can only grow out of the experience to which they 
are relevant. 

II 

As an example of cultural differentiation, which has 
to be compared with the relation of Religion and 
Science, contrast the ideals of Science and of Indus- 
try. Here, in the opposition of the man of theory 

107 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

and the man of practice, the abstract thinker and the 
concrete worker, we have one of the most deep-seated 
of human antagonisms, perhaps the most elemental 
of all, next to the antagonism of sex, yet, like it, 
capable of blending into the most intimate and fruit- 
ful union. In proof of the intimacy and fruitfulness 
of this union, one needs only to cite, amongst recent 
types, such cases as that of Darwin, breeder and 
naturalist; Pasteur, peasant, chemist, physiologist, 
bacteriologist ; Kelvin, mathematician and instrument 
maker; Hooker, gardener and botanist. Amongst 
older examples, recall Lavoisier, chemist and farmer ; 
Linnaeus, shoemaker, gardener, and naturalist; John 
Napier (inventor of logarithms), farmer and mathe- 
matician ; Galileo, astronomer and mechanic ; Simon 
Stevin, engineer and mathematician. In proof of 
the opposition, there is the historical fact that while 
Industry is the oldest of organised human activi- 
ties, Science is the youngest. The priests, the poli- 
ticians, the literary men, the artists, the historians, 
the philosophers, all constituted themselves into 
recognised social groups, long before the man of 
science secured his footing in the scheme of things. 
It is only in a small part of the globe that he has 
done so yet, and even there under narrow restric- 
tions. Science, as an occupation, as a career, is, in 
its own home in the culture centres of the western 
world, officially tolerated if it sponges on charity, 
and socially encouraged and acclaimed if it riots 
into importance and respectability on the produce 
of patent fees. 

The slow growth of the scientific conception of 
1 08 



A Sociological Approach 

causation in the human mind and the restriction of 
its sphere of application is, to be sure, a social phe- 
nomenon of the most general kind, by no means con- 
fined to the industrial class. It is indeed in the mind 
of the manual worker that the sense of an impersonal 
mechanical sequence in phenomena, spontaneously 
arises and develops up to a certain point. Adam 
Smith remarked that amongst no people is found a 
God of Weight; and if modern anthropology discovers 
one, it will be not amongst savage tribes, but amongst 
the devotees of the New Chemistry, or the New 
Astronomy. Be that as it may, the point of insist- 
ence here is that in the mind of the working indus- 
trialist the sense of mechanical sequence, though an 
integral part of his occupational outfit, yet tends to 
operate merely as a subconscious power — like respi- 
ration or any other physiological function. It is part 
of his system of physiological thought, inherited and 
acquired. It belongs to his instinct of workmanship, 
— of which indeed it is the psychic counterpart. It 
is a means to an end, — the end being the produc- 
tion of an object for material use. 

Thus, in respect of primary human origin, the idea 
of causation has apparently been initially generated 
in the mind of the workman ; and that by his occu- 
pational experience. But to the scientist, as abstract 
thinker, has been left the development of the work- 
man's sense of mechanical sequence into an explicit 
Principle of Causation. In his hands the conception 
of causation has become a tool of conscious thought, 
a methodological device of the highest utility in the 
effort to understand Nature. 

109 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

Here also it is a means to an end. But the im- 
mediate end is one not of work, but of abstract 
thought, that is, it is spiritual and not material. It is 
a vision of the world — but a vision of the world 
with its elements of Work and Play, of Accident and 
Design, of Personality and of Mystery, all eliminated 
by the very postulate of its method. It is a picture 
of a world in which the sum total of phenomena, 
past, present, and future, is seen as endless chains of 
causation linked in mechanical sequence, colourless, 
impersonal, quantitatively determined. 

The idea of the principle of causation as a methodo- 
logical convention requiring for its effective use to be 
consciously elaborated by the mind, as the mason's 
chisel requires to be sharpened on the grindstone, is 
a conquest achieved for the race by generations of 
abstract thinkers. The full and free use of this scien- 
tific tool, the competent handling of this principle of 
causation, is a rare quality possessed by relatively few 
people. Its possession by the scientist spiritually dif- 
ferentiates him from the worker. And it is morally con- 
gruent with this deep distinction between the abstract 
thinker and the concrete worker, between Science 
and Industry, that the occupational conduct of the 
industrial group is governed by traditions of reserve 
and secrecy, and that of the scientific, by traditions 
of freedom and publicity. The group-morality or- 
dains that the industrialist shall keep the use of his 
tools a group-secret, and permits it as an individual 
secret. His traditional group-morality, on the other 
hand, compels the scientist to teach the use of scien- 
tific tools, to all who are willing to learn — and to a 

no 



A Sociological Approach 

good many others who are not. In the long pro- 
tracted struggle with the problems of science, the 
efforts of generations of abstract thinkers to devise 
and perfect tools of thought and to teach to others 
the use of these new organs of spiritual power, there 
has grown up — as is the way of human evolution — 
a vast complexity of Craft- Symbolism and Craft- 
Custom. In its most general and abstract form this 
Craft-Symbolism and Custom is Mathematics and 
Logic. 

The formalism of Mathematics and Logic, with its 
apparent absence of objective ritual, may seem at 
first sight to be the farthest possible removed from 
those observances, which, in Conduct and Religion, 
are called ceremonial. But the essence of ceremo- 
nial is the symbolic representation of ideas and emo- 
tions. The degree of objectivity attaching to the 
ritual is incidental. In ordinary religious ceremonial 
it varies from (say) the stage machinery of a Passion 
Play to the imaginary marking of a cruciform sign in 
empty space. Now the modern notion of mathe- 
matical space and time as not identical with, but as 
symbolically related to empirical space and time, 
makes it clear that the ceremonial concept is to be 
found in the very heart of mathematics. Logical 
reasoning is doubtless similarly related to empirical 
reasoning. It would be an undue stretching of lan- 
guage to say that Mathematics and Logic are the 
ceremonialism of science. What is contended is that 
the formalism of Mathematics and Logic is, in the 
scientific group, the spiritual homologue of what, in 
the religious group, is ceremonialism. And, more- 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

over, is it not the case that the extreme refinement 
and attenuation of the ceremonial element in Mathe- 
matics and Logic tends to increase rather than 
diminish the danger which accompanies all symbolic 
expression, the danger of exalting the sign above the 
thing signified, of subordinating the idea or the 
emotion to the form of the expression? To say that, 
does not mean that Mathematicians and Logicians 
are necessarily formalists — they are organisers of 
formalism in the service of Science. The driver of 
fat oxen need not himself be fat — though doubtless 
there is a considerable tendency that way. 

It is a defect of the natural man and a habit of the 
educated man to commit moral suicide with the im- 
plements of their own making, in their different ways. 
That, to be sure, is an absurd upshot for a rational 
being's activity. But, as Hobbes pointed out, it is 
the capacity for absurdity no less than the capacity 
for rationality, that distinguishes man from the ani- 
mals. In respect of both these distinguishing char- 
acteristics, the scientist is amongst the least animal 
of men. The particular absurdity to which the scien- 
tist is prone, is, psychologically speaking, a certain 
loss of memory. He forgets his postulates. He 
forgets that the Principle of Causation, most potent 
of thought engines though it is, yet is but a methodo- 
logical convention of the scientific mind. He forgets 
those elements which by postulatory assumption he 
omitted at the outset from his scheme of thought. 
Especially is he liable to forget altogether the ele- 
ment of Personality, undefinable because unique, and 
the element of Mystery, unmeasurable and unde- 



A Sociological Approach 

termined, but subtly pervading all things as an in- 
exhaustible factor. More strange still perhaps, he 
forgets the elements of Work and Play. He even 
descends sometimes to a contemptuous allusion to 
the vulgarity of utilitarian motives, and then, with the 
consistency of the caviller, he complains of the use- 
lessness of Literature and Art. With reciprocating 
contempt and misunderstanding, the Worker and 
the Artist retaliate by calling the scientist " a mere 
theorist," a " dry-as-dust pedant." 

The scientist who, by overspecialisation, or through 
stunting of early culture, declines into this state of 
obliviousness has become the slave of his own methods. 
In that condition the scientist is a thorough-going 
formalist — a type known to theological discussion as 
an Idolater. Now to the slave there is only wanting 
the opportunity to become a tyrant; and it would be 
mere foolhardiness to deny that there are scientists 
who covet and would grasp the territory of all the 
other cultural groups. That Science should, with its 
ideas, its formulae, and its methods always pervade 
and sometimes invade the domain of Philosophy, 
History, and Literature, is natural, inevitable, and 
highly productive of useful results. But the scientist 
is at once obscurantist and tyrannical, if he denies 
legitimacy to the various methodological conventions 
which generations of philosophers and historians, 
writers and poets, artists and women, have devised 
for dealing with their particular order of problems. 
The dialectic of philosophy, the aesthetic induction 
(to use the phrase of Helmholtz) of the historian 
and the literary man, the intuition of the poet and 
8 113 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

the woman, are all of them conscious or subconscious 
methods of knowledge, which, rightly used, stand in 
supplementary and not exclusive relation to the 
scientific principle of Causation. Of the positive 
value and function of dogma, nothing need here be 
said, for Theology has no monopoly of that useful 
method of research. And, to be fair, it must be 
added that Science has no monopoly of the misuse 
of dogma. 1 

The sociological position of the scientist becomes 
more intelligible if we regard the type as comprised 

1 The student of methodology treats as a rare and precious 
specimen the scientific writer who shows any clearness of per- 
ception, in respect of the borderland which separates scientific 
proof from dogmatic utterance. It is one of the saddest and 
most damaging reproaches against the scientific group, that, 
with all their insistence on method and nomenclature, yet 
neither their methodology nor their terminology takes formal 
account of the process by which practical precepts and maxims 
of conduct are derivable from scientific generalisations. This 
defect explains not a little of the misunderstanding between 
Science and Religion, for the relation of conduct to general 
truths is the special field of theological dogma. The few who, 
as sociologists, have tried to cultivate this field scientifically, 
have been sooner or later condemned by the congregations of 
Scientists and Philosophers, and forthwith excommunicated 
— their books put on the Index, themselves persecuted as 
heretics. That is why, for two generations, sociologists have 
wandered as pariahs amongst the outcasts of Science and 
Philosophy. The history of the persecutions of innovators by 
the pontifical officialdom of Science and Philosophy has yet to 
be written. The materials are ample and daily increasing. 
Plus ca change, plus c*est la mhne chose. And yet the pion- 
eers of sociology did not enjoy the good fortune of St. Augus- 
tine, who, it is well known, escaped excommunication by taking 
the precaution of being an Early Father. 

114 



A Sociological Approach 

of two varieties. And if we call one the " Naturalist " 
and the other the " Logician," 2 that must not be taken 
to imply any exclusive differentiation between the two 
varieties, but only a predominant tendency in each. 
The scientific type itself stands for a certain attitude 
of man towards nature, — an attitude in which the 
intellectual is at its maximum and the emotional at 
its minimum. In the " naturalist," the emotional 
element persists with sufficient intensity to raise from 
among his occupational ideas, human ideals, poten- 
tial if not active. In the " logician," the emotional 
element tends to be reduced to vanishing point, and 
when that happens the investigator becomes a victim 
of his intellectual machinery, — he becomes, in fact, 
a mere formalist. This psychological distinction is 
important sociologically, because it is a chief factor 
in determining the associations between the scientific 
and other social groups, — their alliances and their 
hostilities; their possibilities of co-operation or of 
conflict. 

Ill 

The groups previously enumerated as sociologically 
co-ordinate with the Scientists were — it will be re- 
membered — the Industrialists, the Literary Men and 
Artists, the Politicians, the Historians, and the Phil- 
osophers. It is contended that the individuals com- 
posing each of these groups may be psychologically 

1 If it were permissible to coin a word, " logicist " would be 
preferable in order to avoid confusion with the professed logi- 
cian, who is usually a philosopher strayed into the camp of the 
scientists. 

"5 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

classified on a basis of division similar to that applied 
to the scientists — and with corresponding sociologi- 
cal implications. In other words, the representative 
type of personality in each group may be treated as 
one or other of two varieties. In the one variety, 
the more emotional, the group-ideals are relatively 
concrete, and hence being more capable of expres- 
sion, artistic or other, they predominate in thought 
and action over the group-formalism. In the other 
variety, the group-ideals are subordinated to those 
methodological conventions which constitute the 
group-formalism; and the individual's course of 
life and conduct may thus come to be very differ- 
ently directed. The former variety may be called 
Idealist and the latter Formalist 1 — provided, as al- 

1 The objections to this usage of these two familiar words 
are obvious and real. Both words, however plastic in mean- 
ing, have yet a connotation more definite and limited than 
is here intended. The difficulty can only be met, and that 
partially, by new coinages. For the type of personality here 
designated Formalist, Mr. William Macdonald suggests the 
word Formulist, — a person whose faith is in Formula. Mr. 
Macdonald writes: "As to a substitute, I think the coinage 
'formulist,' as the designation of all those who deal with 
knowledge on the Chinese assumption that it has reference to 
a static system of things and an immutable consent, and who 
deal with facts at that stage at which they have become figures, 
and with figures at that stage at which they have become 
algebraic expressions — for these people, I say, or for people 
in this phase of mind, the word ' formulist ' would be a good 
descriptive designation and brand of infamy. ' Formulism ' is 
absolutely accurate as to meaning and has the advantage of 
being pure, antiseptic, neutral, trolled by a sense of humour." 
For "idealist" in the text Mr. Macdonald suggests "vitalist." 

116 



A Sociological Approach 

ready said, that these designations are taken to imply 
merely a predominant tendency in the one or other 
direction, and are not understood as drawing a sharp 
line of demarcation which puts on the right, a num- 
ber of persons devoid of formalism, and on the left, 
persons without idealism. In every individual the 
two qualities are manifestly mingled. But it is im- 
portant, both for practical and for theoretical pur- 
poses, to be able to distinguish between those in 
whom the one or other quality predominates. 

Space prescribed forbids any adequate demonstra- 
tion of the grounds of this classification here adduced 
as of general validity. But the mere dogmatic state- 
ment of the thesis has its uses. Propounded to an 
Idealist, no matter of what group, it will generally 
be found to receive his assent. On the other hand, 
let the proposition be advanced in the presence of a 
Formalist, then, whether he be a philosopher or a 
man of affairs, a historian or a politician, a scientist 
or an artist, he will, in all probability, say it is rub- 
bish. Thus, in the hands of those practically con- 
cerned with the classification of their fellow-men, it 
may serve as a touchstone of character. The prin- 
ciple is doubtless well-known to students of Pastoral 
Theology. 



IV 

In the case of the industrial group, a classification of 
psychological types has been worked out, and their 
social evolution traced, by Mr. Thorstein Veblen in 

117 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

a remarkable book. 1 To have combined in one trea- 
tise something of Herbert Spencer's philosophical 
massiveness, of William James* psychological subtlety, 
of Karl Marx's power of reconstructing economic 
formulae, and to have brightened the whole from a 
new vein of humour is a feat of which American 
Sociology may reasonably boast. Mr. Veblen's 
thesis is briefly this: The earliest subdivision of 
labour, arising out of and superimposed on that of 
sex, is a division of occupations into those that are 
of the nature of exploit and prowess, and those that 
are of the nature of drudgery. The corresponding 
psychological types are characterised by, on the one 
hand, audacity and predaciousness, and on the other 
by timidity and submission. The correlative socio- 
logical grouping is into a higher class engaged in 
" honorific occupations," and a lower class engaged 
in " humilific occupations." The military occupation 
is manifestly one that is highly honorific, not only 
because it serves to display audacity and prowess, but 
also because by affording opportunity for the accu- 
mulation of loot, it provides means for a peaceful 
occupation that is also highly honorific, — the " per- 
formance of leisure." And with the growth of civili- 
sation, the increase of wealth, the further subdivision 
and specialisation of labour, numerous refinements 
of honorific occupation become possible. The per- 
formance of leisure, for instance, at first only under- 
taken by the superior person himself, may be 

1 " The Theory of the Leisure Class, — an Economic Study 
in the Evolution of Institutions," by Thorstein Veblen. New 
York, The Macmillan Co., 1899. 

118 



A Sociological Approach 

increasingly assisted by others, wife, family, and in- 
creasing circles of dependents, at length quite vicari- 
ously performed, — as by engaging a stalwart Hercules 
to serve as a Footman. Moreover, this vicarious 
performance of leisure has the further advantage of 
setting free the Master Man himself to satisfy those 
universal human instincts of workmanship which, in 
the higher class scheme of life, tend to be countered 
by the exigencies of honorific leisure. Having taken 
adequate precautions against the derogation of his 
gentlemanly status (primarily, by the copious, regu- 
lar, and manifest consumption of costly goods, in his 
person, and if possible also vicariously, by his atten- 
dants and household), the man of higher class, now 
clearly distinguished by this process of " conspicu- 
ous waste," permits himself to relax from the per- 
formance of leisure, and engage in occupations that 
otherwise might mark him with the taint of drudgery. 
Particularly is this the case when the industrial system 
reaches that stage of development where it bases 
itself on a money economy. A change from the 
system of payment in kind to payment in money, 
means a revolution in the methodological conventions 
of the industrial system. And this revolution is in 
the direction of a more facile exaltation of method at 
the expense of ideal. It involves great possibilities 
of wealth acquisition by audacious manipulation of 
the symbols and tokens of industrial values. Here, 
in fact, are new and abundant opportunities for 
achievements of exploit and prowess (cunning in- 
creasingly aiding force) ; and their gains conse- 
quently admit of the creation and multiplication of 

119 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

new occupations, honorific and other. These whole 
later refinements of the progress of civilisation are 
broadly spoken of as Financiering. 

Such, in too scanty outline, is Mr. Veblen's theory. 1 
It is cited here as affording grounds for a sociological 
subdivision of the Industrial group parallel to that 
of the Scientific group. Attending the evolution of 
honorific occupations there has been a luxuriant cul- 
tural growth of formalism. The distinction between 
honorific and humilific occupations is manifestly the 
economic correlative of the juristic distinction be- 
tween Status and Contract. And the elaborate and 
ever-increasing organisation of formalism into cere- 
monialism, which everywhere accompanies a system 
of Status, adorning and supporting it, is too univer- 
sally known to need illustration. On this adamantine 
crust of custom, which envelopes the well-baked cake 
of status, innovating genius has countless times 
broken its teeth. 

What is the economic need and consequent aim of 
a system based on status? It is, in the talk of the 
home, the possession of " private means ; " in the 
language of the modern market-place, it is the " hold- 
ing of investments ; " in the cultural terminology and 
aspiration of the learned world, it is the creation of 
pecuniary " endowments." Contrast this with the 
economic aim of those engaged in humilific occupa- 

1 It will be observed that Mr. Veblen's theory reaches a 
larger and perhaps a more fruitful economic generalisation than 
that of Comte and Spencer — the economic law of development 
from militarist to industrial civilisation being included and 
transcended in Mr. Veblen's theory, its apparent reversions 
becoming explained. 

120 



A Sociological Approach 

tions. What does the workman ask but a job? What 
remuneration does he seek but pay for work done? 
The inherent social inferiority is obvious. Yet is 
this inferiority after all so desirable? If not, is it 
inevitable, is it permanent? 

To these simple and common economic ends of 
job and pay, there only needs to be added an equally 
simple and common conception, yet one not only in- 
dustrial, but aesthetic, scientific, and moral also, that 
of a " good job," and these humble aims straightway 
rise and extend to the level of a social ideal, potential 
or actual. The social and ideal aspects of a good job 
are doubtless, in the minds of the great majority of 
workers, latent; they exist nevertheless in subcon- 
scious motivation. And in the very fact of their 
present unconsciousness lies their importance for us 
here, since it reveals natural processes at work tend- 
ing to the harmonisation of individual interests with 
group-interests, and of group-interests with the largest 
social interests. The master-discovery of spiritual 
man lies in the awakening of these subconscious 
social ideals and in devising means for educating 
them into the richest blossomings of regenerative 
social service. It is noteworthy that the great " ac- 
coucheurs d'esprit" throughout history have been, 
almost without exception, persons given to humilific 
occupations, — either by inheritance, or by personal 
predilection. 

The workers, to be sure, are already not without 
their own organisation of symbol and of custom. 
And a tough and unprogressive formalism and cere- 
monialism it largely is. Yet looking at it in the large 

121 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

historic way, their group-formalism shows a tendency 
to be subordinated to group-idealism. Must not the 
contrary be said of that variety of the industrial type 
represented by the Pecuniary Culture? The endowed 
individual may himself rise to exalted heights of 
social idealism. But in process of doing so, he con- 
stantly loses or resigns his privileges of endowment. 
Otherwise it is only by a miracle of moral sensitive- 
ness that he can respond to the general sense of 
social solidarity. In the mere fact of endowment, 
there is a certain degree of social isolation, which, if 
not in the individual, yet in the course of two or three 
generations does and must tend to produce anti- 
social elements in the subconscious motivation of 
conduct. Sociologically, the individual is a member 
of a group, an item in a series, a punctuation in a 
system. The present contention is that, within the 
Industrial Group, there is at work a methodological 
principle, of which the apparatus and process — that 
of Financiering — tend to produce a variety of the 
group-type, in which Idealism is subordinated to 
Formalism and Ceremonialism. 

The conflict between Religion and Science, much 
in evidence though it has been during the past three 
or four centuries, is thus but a mushroom affair com- 
pared with that conflict between Religion and the 
pecuniary interest above analysed ; so that we may 
now identify the ponderous general enunciation which 
we have just reached, as a tardy sociological restate- 
ment of a time-worn aphorism of religion : " Ye 
cannot serve God and Mammon." The early Chris- 
tian thought about the difficulty of the rich man 

122 



A Sociological Approach 

entering the kingdom of heaven, and the apparent 
exaggeration of the love of money, as the root of 
all evil, crystallised in the mediaeval Catholic Church 
into a definite pronouncement of the Canon Law, 
that Commerce "displicet Deo." Of the many appli- 
cations of this principle by religion, one of the most 
ancient and wide-spread is, of course, the attempt 
made not only by the Christian, but by other churches, 
to extinguish, or to mitigate usury. 

Here, in the opposition of the church to the pecu- 
niary interest, is incidentally revealed one of the many 
sources of conflict between Religion and Science. 
The ecclesiastical condemnation of the rich man is 
doubtless a theoretical deprecation, tempered in prac- 
tice by copious adulation. But the point to observe 
is just this — that it is theoretical; that there is im- 
plicit in theological doctrine a moral theory of the 
use of wealth. The religious attitude to wealth em- 
phasises what in economic terminology is termed 
consumption, as against production. Precisely the 
contrary is the traditional attitude of the science of 
economics, — if, by the courtesy of physicists and 
biologists, economics may be counted in the circle of 
the sciences. Until the present generation, economic 
science not only offered no theory of consumption, 
but even repudiated the need for one. When eco- 
nomic science is able to formulate a theory of con- 
sumption, — and it is now beginning to do so, — it 
does not of course follow that the scientific theory 
will square with that implicitly contained in Chris- 
tian doctrine. But a purely obscurantist element of 
conflict between Religion and Science will be elimi- 

123 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

nated, and the way prepared for an unbiassed discus- 
sion of common ground. 

Now it is fair to generalise this instance as typical 
of many cases of conflict between Religion and 
Science. Generations of empirical observers, using 
subconscious or semi-conscious methods, have dimly 
reached many deep-seated truths and incorporated 
them — it may be in vague and approximate form — 
in religious doctrine. And it frequently happens 
that this sort of truth is the last to be consciously 
reached by the scientist and formulated in verifiable 
shape. Yet, meanwhile, Science, with the ready as- 
surance of youth, is too apt to oppose to the claim 
of Religion to holiness of thought its own immature 
synthesis of totality — which proves, on further ex- 
amination, to be not a genuine whole, but a partial 
and fragmentary aspect of the truth. 



After the Industrial, the remaining Groups that have 
to be considered in respect of a possible distinction 
into Idealists and Formalists, are the Literary and 
Artistic, the Political, the Historical, and the Philo- 
sophical. In any adequate scheme of treatment, the 
questions to be asked about each of these would be 
somewhat as follows: What particular aspects of 
human nature constitute the special group-interest ? 
How does it come about that this particular interest 
gets established as an end of group-activities? What 
means — what special methodological conventions — 

124 



A Sociological Approach 

have been devised by the collective group-experience, 
to achieve its specific ends? We should have to in- 
quire also, under what conditions the methodological 
conventions of the group develop into an organised 
formalism, and under what conditions this, with its 
associated ceremonialism, may hinder or favour the 
evolution of group ends into social ideals. And all 
these general inquiries would, were an adequate 
sociological investigation here possible, be the theo- 
retic accompaniment of actual observation. Such 
observation would be directed to ascertain what in- 
dividuals are, as a matter of fact, arrested in their 
spiritual development by getting enmeshed within 
the nets of group-formalism ; and what individuals 
do, as a matter of fact, pass in the opposite direction, 
from the quest of individual ends to group ends, 
and from these to the striving for social ideals. The 
latter — the idealists — in their individual lives run 
the full course of the racial development of the 
group; the former — the formalists — by failure of 
educational process or by defect of inheritance, never 
get awakened to the higher spiritual stages of racial 
evolution. These inquiries and investigations ob- 
viously cannot, however, be now entered upon. It 
must here suffice if we deal with the remaining 
groups in the briefest possible way. 

In Literature, the distinction between the Formal- 
ists or Stylists and the Humanists is familiar to all, 
as an example of the psychological analysis here 
attempted ; the Stylists making method an end in 
itself, and the Humanists making it serve as a means 
to an end. Equally familiar in other departments of 

125 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

aesthetics are the doctrine and practice of " Art for 
Art's sake." But it is not so widely recognised, 
that the pictorial, the plastic, and other fine arts, as 
well as the Literary, oppose their humanists to 
their stylists. Erasmus and Melancthon have their 
strict homologues in Leonardo and Michael Angelo ; 
Goethe and Emerson, in Corot and Millet, in 
Beethoven and Wagner. The Stylists are manifestly 

— in the terms of our analysis — the Formalists; and 
the Humanists, the Idealists — potential or actual 

— of the Literary and Artistic Group. As a typical 
example of the relation of this group to the Religious, 
take Matthew Arnold's " Literature and Dogma," 
where the Humanists of Literature are depicted as 
in harmony with the Idealists of Religion, and in 
conflict with the Dogmatists of Religion. 



VI 

In Politics, it is not difficult to decipher the Ideal- 
ists and the Formalists. Politicians have been ac- 
cused of inefficiency in all departments, save indeed 
one, that of advertisement. Thanks to their efficiency 
in securing publicity, politicians of all types are 
known to every one who reads history, or absorbs 
fiction. Thus it is easy to instance well-known ex- 
amples of every variety of politician, even of idealists 
astray in that group. But first it is necessary to say 
a word in this case also as to group ends and group 
means. 

The aim of the group activity called Politics is the 
126 



A Sociological Approach 

organisation of social selection. Taking the phrase 
in its largest sense, natural selection, to be sure, in- 
cludes social selection and manifests itself as such, 
under certain conditions. But that is a form of 
language which sociologists use and biologists gener- 
ally abuse. The biologist only earns his right to the 
use of such a nomenclature by turning sociologist 
pro tern. These subtleties apart, the fact remains that 
there exists a powerful and abiding group of persons 
devoting themselves to the organisation of selective 
processes, by which certain group and individual 
types are encouraged, and others eliminated. 

As in other cases, occupational experience, accu- 
mulating through generations of politicians, has de- 
vised highly specialised means towards the attainment 
of group ends. This highly specialised development 
of group organs (chiefly prehensile) is the system of 
Law. Jurisprudence is the methodology of Politics. 
Legalism is the Formalism of Politics. 

This is not to say all lawyers are formalists. That 
is far from being the case. As every sociological 
observer must be aware, there are to be found 
amongst the members of that immemorial profession 
many political idealists, especially among those 
lawyers who have early in life given up practice. 
Nor is it to deny that multitudes of political formal- 
ists are to be found outside the legal profession. In 
fact, the typical formalist of Politics is not the lawyer, 
but the policeman. In the policeman we see group 
ends completely subordinated to, or perhaps, one 
should say, identified with, group means. Whatever 
of social selection proceeds from him, is exercised 

127 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

automatically by uniform and baton. This truth 
finds unconscious expression in that growing usage 
of political nomenclature by which the body of police 
is spoken of as " the force." In the identification of 
means and end, of symbol and process, which, philo- 
sophically speaking, supports the police scheme of 
social selection, the orthodox biologist will recog- 
nise the principle of Natural Selection, and the 
progressive theologian will recognise the principle 
of idolatry. 

But who are the idealists of Politics? Here, we 
may, without offence, have recourse to illustrative 
examples. Many familiar pictures will at once sug- 
gest themselves from history. Take, for instance, 
more than one Roman Emperor of the second cen- 
tury, consciously applying, with a superb heroism, 
the maxims of the stoical philosophy, both to per- 
sonal conduct and to political Government, having at 
command every resource of refined luxury, but 
choosing in externals the simplicity of a peasant's 
life, often on foot, bare-headed, unattended, in end- 
less perambulations, ceaselessly supervising the cities 
of the vast domain ; or take Charlemagne, creating 
local administration, organising the resources of a 
complex culture, strenuous to infect every one with 
his own simple and frugal habits, his own zeal for 
hard work, his own passion for culture ; or King 
Alfred, after expelling the foreign invaders, devoting 
himself to the organisation of education, setting up 
schools, seeing to the publishing of suitable literature 
for the people; or Cromwell, selecting his Parliament 
from those whom he believed to be the wise, the 

128 



A Sociological Approach 

honest, and the good; or Frederick the Great (after 
the experience of war had taught him its horrors and 
futilities), living without parade in a cottage, working 
like a galley-slave in the public service, selecting his 
friends from amongst philosophers and scientists, 
acting on his own maxim, that " a man that seeks 
truth and loves it, must be reckoned precious in every 
society; " or Jefferson, striving to unite political phil- 
osophy with practical administration, and thus com- 
bine in the creation of a new nation the qualities both 
of patriotism and cosmopolitanism, while rejecting 
the defects of each, so that " every man might have 
two countries, his own and France." 

'Tis needless to multiply examples. The point is, 
to observe something of the process by which group 
ends may be transmuted into social ideals. In Poli- 
tics, as elsewhere, the dynamic of progress remains, 
as yet, a more than half-concealed secret. But one 
factor at least is conspicuous in the lives of political 
idealists. And that is the indomitable quest and per- 
sistent utilisation of moral and intellectual forces that 
reside in the activities characteristic of other social 
groups than their own. Hence the lavish encourage- 
ment of cultural agencies by idealist politicians, their 
reliance on education, their organised efforts to 
democratise the sources of culture. 1 (Educationists, 
generally speaking, are not politicians, but idealist 

1 " It becomes every day more evident how hopeless is the 
task of reconstructing political institutions, without the previous 
remodelling of opinion and life." General View of Positivism, 
trans. J. H. Bridges, p. 2. This was no new doctrine in 1848, 
but there are fewer likely to dispute it now than then. 

9 I2 9 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

politicians are necessarily educationists.) Hence 
also their sparing and cautious use of juristic means 
either for the purpose of bettering bad customs or 
of confirming good ones. On its negative side, the 
political ideal is tersely put in that letter of Trajan 
to Pliny the younger when Governor of Bithynia, — 
much quoted, but always worth quoting again, — 
" Let the people alone, do not interfere with their 
customary rights of self-government. See that no 
new local taxes are imposed and that there is no 
waste or jobbery : but otherwise let them manage for 
themselves." A customary modern example of crea- 
tive idealism by politicians is the establishment of 
the University of Berlin, as a primary step in the re- 
organisation of a devastated country. A relatively 
perfected combination of these two aspects — the 
negative and the positive — of political idealism, is 
seen in the life of Turgot 1 But it is arguable that 
the highest achievements of political idealism have 
been reached by men not reckoned as of the political 
group — in former times, for instance, by the organ- 
isers of the great monastic institutions ; in recent 
times, by great administrators — at once temporal 
and spiritual — like Thomas Chalmers, or even — 
though it smacks of paradox to say it — by Robert 

1 " The most memorable example in modern times of a man 
who united the spirit of philosophy with the pursuits of active 
life, and kept wholly clear from the partialities and prejudices 
both of the student and of the practical statesman, was Turgot, 
who will long remain the wonder not only of his age, but of all 
history, for his astonishing combination of the most opposite, 
and (judging from common experience) almost incompatible 
excellences." J. S. Mill, West. Rev. xxvi. p. 25. 

130 



A Sociological Approach 

Owen. With a degree more of audacity, it might 
be maintained that the archetype of idealist politician 
is the common or domestic housewife. The subordi- 
nation of personal to social ends, and of intellect to 
feeling, which psychologically characterises woman, 
has its sociological correlate in a combination of 
devoutness in ceremonial observance, with a high 
degree of potentiality for idealism. In this, as in 
a certain habit of clothing, the Priest mimetically 
approaches the Woman. And thereby he acquires 
something of that primal magic of sex — the mys- 
terious moralising or demoralising force which, ac- 
cording to circumstances, is a chief determinant in 
spiritual progress or degeneration. 1 

In regard to the conflict between Church and 
State a single point only can be noted. Where, as in 
existing occidental civilisation, Politics and Religion 
are occupationally represented by organised groups, 
then a certain degree of opposition between Political 
and Religious interests would appear to be inevitable 
and perennial. There will, in the nature of things, be 
found in both groups, individuals whose interests are 
mainly material, and individuals whose interests are 
mainly spiritual. The former are, in the terms of 
the analysis here attempted, the formalist or cere- 
monialist variant of the group type, and the latter, 
the idealist variant. The interests of the Politicians 
as a group, on the whole, are doubtless material, and 
those of the Priestly group, on the whole, spiritual. 

1 It is noteworthy that of all the great centralised Govern- 
ments, the only one which, according to current rumour, has its 
finances in thoroughly sound order is the Vatican. 

131 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

And hence, on this ground alone, a tendency to 
group-conflict, as well as to group-co-operation. 
But circumstances constantly arise in which the 
cleavage between the two varieties — the formalist 
and the idealist — in each group will prove greater 
than any inter-group opposition. The idealists of 
each group will then tend to ally against the form- 
alists of each. The conflict between the temporal 
and the spiritual power thus tends to become more 
and more a conflict of individual types rather than of 
occupational groups. 



VII 

In respect of the Historians, it may help us to our 
sociological classification to recall the early times 
when the historical group was only partially differ- 
entiated from the Literary and Artistic on one side 
and the Priestly group on the other. The annalists 
and chroniclers of those days had recourse to a 
simple process of itemised enumeration — a naive 
application of primitive mathematical resources to 
the record of phenomena in time. The early annal- 
ists and chroniclers had many merits. Their chief 
defects were two. They enjoyed a nicety of discrimi- 
nation which insured the almost invariable omission 
from their record, of the more important phenomena. 
In the second place, they had a sense of causation 
which was embryonic or defective. The old annalist 
type survives in living examples, numerous and con- 
spicuous. It was the prevalence of this type and its 
spiritual homology with the formalist of science that 

132 



A Sociological Approach 

prompted Matthew Arnold's prophecy, that if he 
lived to be eighty years of age, he would be the only 
person in England who read anything beside news- 
papers and scientific transactions. He forgot, how- 
ever, that the formalists of Literature, Theology, and 
Philosophy have an army of printers in their service. 

A highly specialised and invaluable variant of this 
annalist type is the statistician. He, to be sure, is, 
in the higher examples of the variety, by no means 
deficient in the sense of causation, but rather has 
gone to the other extreme, and suffered a hypertro- 
phied development of it, accompanied by correspond- 
ing atrophy of faculty for using other methods of 
historical research. Statistics by no means comprises 
the whole methodology of history, but it is a large 
part of it. And he who over-indulges in the statis- 
tical method, runs that risk of spiritual paralysis 
which insidiously lurks in all subordination of ends 
to means. He is, in short, on the high road to 
becoming a historical formalist. 

There is a modern myth which tells how even the 
most eminent and gifted of investigators may, under 
certain circumstances, become the victim of the statis- 
tical habit. There was, so the story runs, a certain 
Cantabrian who, in his youth, achieved great emi- 
nence in the mathematical sciences. He was also a 
man of noble presence. A single glance at his coun- 
tenance showed him to be a man of inspiration and, 
moreover, not only a born idealist, but also a born 
leader of idealists. Interested in the activities of 
every social group, he himself made illuminating 
researches, not only in his own subject of mathe- 

i33 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

matical science, but also in many others, especially 
in history. By an accident of occupational exigency, 
he undertook the production of an exhaustive treatise 
on the History of the Theory of Numbers. By a few- 
years of intense effort he produced a monumental 
work, such as might legitimately have used up the 
lives of half-a-dozen senior wranglers. But the effect 
of this over-specialisation was disastrous on the per- 
sonality of the Cantabrian himself. He had become 
hypnotised by numbers. Numbers filled his vision 
to the exclusion of all else he had previously cher- 
ished. His power of statistical investigation became 
little short of miraculous. But where previously he 
had arduously sought soul-satisfying ideals, he was 
now content with the husks of formalism. Like the 
American who retired from business after making a 
fortune in saw-milling, but soon returned to spend his 
leisure in building new saw-mills up and down his 
disforested country, because " he did not know what 
else to do ; " so this gifted mathematician might be 
said to have spent his later life in statistical investi- 
gation, because he had forgotten that the very things, 
the importance or interest of which had launched 
him on his great career of calculating about them, 
still continued to exist in the world, and were still 
interesting on their own account ! 

He repeated constantly the favourite prayer of his 
youth : " Give us, O Creator, good men." But that it 
had become little more than an empty formula was 
evident. For whenever a Good Man presented him- 
self, the Cantabrian promptly asked : " Are you a 
Number?" And when the Good Man modestly re- 

i34 



A Sociological Approach 

plied that he was commonly counted something more 
than a cipher, the Cantabrian was wont to sigh and 
say sadly, there was no use in the intellectual world 
for anything but numbers. But sometimes there 
would flash into his eye a gleam of the old crusading 
zeal, and then the Cantabrian would promptly dismiss 
the Good Man, condemning him, with a pontifical 
utterance, to eternal perdition. 

This story manifestly belongs to the mythology of 
the Pervert. 

Who are the idealists of the historical group? 
What is the end of their group-activity? Is it not 
the ever-widening and more verified knowledge, the 
ever-deepening consciousness of the process of Be- 
coming, in Man and Nature? And what individuals 
have contributed most to the growing knowledge of 
evolutionary processes? To ask the question is to 
think of Vico and Herder, of Kant and Hegel, of 
Comte and Spencer; of BufTon and Lamarck also, of 
Lyell and Darwin, with their forerunners and their 
continuators. Are we then to say that the evolu- 
tionists are the idealists of the historical group? 
Psychologically that is doubtless so. But sociologi- 
cally, they are still rather potential than actual idealists. 
To transmute group ends into social ideals, there 
must be added some element of emotional interest 
derived from a wider experience than that of the 
group. We must seek a knowledge of evolutionary 
processes, not only for itself, but also for its human 
applications. We must generalise experience of the 
past, not only from the point of view of the present, 
but also of the future ; not only from the point of 

i35 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

view of Nature, but also of Man. In order to aid the 
development of any given type, animal or human 
(that is, to educate it), we must know much of the 
law and the limit of its general process of evolution. 
It is the search for this knowledge (human and natu- 
ral), with a view to its practical application to social 
regeneration, that lies at the root of historical ideal- 
ism. In respect of conscious, deliberate, systematic 
efforts in this direction, the two great sociological 
pioneers are Condorcet and Auguste Comte. 

Condorcet's " Sketch of the Progress of the Human 
Mind " is not a purely historical and theoretical 
work. It contains, in a long final chapter, an at- 
tempt to [deduce maxims of social organisation and 
precepts of individual conduct, from the principles 
previously reached by inductive historical generalis- 
ation. This last part of the " Sketch " has to be 
taken along with Condorcet's plan of national educa- 
tion, drawn up for the Constituent Assembly, and 
with his " Atlantide," or scheme for the organisation 
of scientific research. All these are fragmentary 
parts of systematic, but uncompleted, efforts to build 
up a practical social Art of regeneration on a basis 
of a social science, theoretical and historical. The 
same conception — at once evolutionary and regen- 
eratory — of developmental continuity from the Past 
through the Present into the Future, dictated the 
scheme of Comte's life and work. The six theoreti- 
cal and historical volumes of " The Positive Phil- 
osophy" were followed by the four practical and 
idealistic volumes of the " Positive Polity." There 
was thus conceived the art of constructing idealistic 

136 



A Sociological Approach 

Utopias, based no longer on poetic dreams and 
personal aspirations, but on a systematic study of 
immediate possibilities disclosed by scientific and 
historical investigation. It is a branch of Applied 
Sociology which, after a century of cultivation in 
France, is gaining its first notable exponent amongst 
the English-speaking peoples, in Mr. H. G. Wells. 



VIII 

It is the boast of philosophers that they are the 
masters of all intellectual methods and slaves of 
none. If this were universally and literally true, 
there would be no need to look for the formalist 
type in the philosophical group, for none would be 
found. But there are few of us whose circle of ac- 
quaintance is so narrow as not to have met the unphil- 
osophical philosopher. He may be seen flourishing 
in any well-endowed University. In academic seclu- 
sion, he is recognised by an unusual tranquillity of 
mind, by the superiority of his culture, by the reality 
of his convictions, or at least by his convictions about 
reality. Faced with the problems of practical life, he 
displays the full complement of vacillation and pre- 
judice which, according to Novalis, it is the chief 
object of philosophy to expel. Equipped with a 
smattering of positive knowledge and a first-rate 
classical education, he demonstrates the existence (or 
the non-existence) of God, Freedom, and Immortal- 
ity, in a treatise of consummate dialectical skill and 
prodigious learning. Sociologically, the type is a 

*37 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

product of endowed Schools of Philosophy, — though 
that is not to deny other modes of generation or other 
products to these schools. Psychologically, the type 
is the resultant and victim of a highly specialised oc- 
cupational methodology. The dialectical method is 
a powerful instrument of research in the hands of a 
master. In the hands of a bungler, it is a weapon, 
at worst murderous, at best suicidal. The ensuing 
tragedy is the sacrifice of an individual in the develop- 
ment of a psychological process socially useful. The 
mere dialectician is, in short, a piacular victim of 
philosophical formalism. 

To apply to the opposite type of philosopher the 
designation " idealist " is apt to be particularly mis- 
leading, because that word is already appropriated 
as a technical characterisation by a particular school 
of intellectual thought. The reference here, how- 
ever, is to personality and not to intellectual postu- 
lates or methods. The psychological type here 
characterised as a philosophical " idealist," is very 
much what popular instinct recognises as the wise 
man or sage, — the man whose life and conduct 
attest the sincerity of his communion with the all- 
pervading mystery of the universe. From Socrates 
to Spencer, the history of Philosophy yields copious 
illustration of the sage. And the lesson afforded 
by the study of their lives is that, given a tolerable 
ancestry and the experience of an honest job, then 
a man may hope by the pursuit of philosophy to 
achieve the Platonic ideal of " bringing forth not 
images of beauty but realities," and thus become 
" the Friend of God." 

138 



A Sociological Approach 

The case of Spinoza, the lens-polisher, is partic- 
ularly instructive in respect of the present argument, 
because of its immediate bearing on the evolution of 
Religion. Philosophy has so often served to mediate 
between Science and History on the one hand, and 
Religion on the other, that we may consider that 
office to be a large part of the essential and charac- 
teristic function of the philosophical group. The 
permanent exhortation of the Philosopher to the 
Priest is, in the phrase of Diderot, " Enlargissez 
Dieu ! " A not dissimilar idea was behind the words 
of Leibnitz, when he said that he only studied science 
and history in order that he might speak with au- 
thority in Philosophy and Religion. It means to say 
that the Spiritual Ideal of the Religious Group must 
be expanded in harmony with the growth of verified 
knowledge, or it will fall away from its state of holi- 
ness and become partial and fragmentary, dispersive 
and particularist. The priesthood, as the group 
traditionally organised for the guardianship of com- 
munitary spiritual interests, is deeply concerned with 
Science and History, for what are Science and His- 
tory, as represented by the Idealists of the two groups, 
but phases and manifestations of human spirituality? 
It is here that, in his mediatory office, the philosopher 
may and should intervene, testing and refining the 
spiritual innovations offered by Science and History 
(and by Literature and Art also) for incorporation 
within the scheme of religious ideals. 

It was this service which, in the name of philosophy, 
Spinoza offered the churches of the day. What he 
practically said to the churches of his day was just 

139 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

the counsel of Diderot, as of every other " idealist " 
philosopher, but it was accompanied by a detailed 
prescription for carrying it out. 1 He not only de- 

1 The gist of his teaching — his conception of idealism and 
its methodology — is stated in the following extract from that in- 
spiring autobiographical fragment, the unfinished " Essay on the 
Improvement of the Mind," trans. Elwes. II. pp. 6 and 7: " I 
will here only briefly state what I mean by true good, and also 
what is the nature of the highest good. In order that this may 
be rightly understood, we must bear in mind that the terms good 
and evil are only applied relatively, so that the same thing may 
be called both good and bad, according to the relations in view, 
in the same way as it may be called perfect or imperfect. Noth- 
ing regarded in its own nature can be called perfect or imper- 
fect; especially when we are aware that all things which come 
to pass, come to pass according to the eternal order and fixed 
laws of nature. However, human weakness cannot attain to 
this order in its own thoughts, but meanwhile man conceives a 
human character much more stable than his own, and sees that 
there is no reason why he should not himself acquire such a 
character. Thus he is led to seek for means which will bring 
him to this pitch of perfection, and calls everything which will 
serve as such means a true good. The chief good is that he 
should arrive, together with other individuals if possible, at the 
possession of the aforesaid character. What that character is 
we shall show in due time, namely, that it is the knowledge of 
the union existing between the mind and the whole of nature. 
This, then, is the end for which I strive, to attain to such a char- 
acter myself, and to endeavour that many should attain to it with 
me. In other words, it is part of my happiness to lend a help- 
ing hand, that many others may understand even as I do, so 
that their understanding and desire may entirely agree with my 
own. In order to bring this about, it is necessary to understand 
as much of nature as will enable us to attain to the aforesaid 
character, and also to form a social order such as is most con- 
ductive to the attainment of this character by the greatest 
number with the least difficulty and danger. We must seek the 

140 



A Sociological Approach 

clared that the ideals of religion must expand with 
the growth of scientific and historical studies, but he 
also offered a new synthesis, harmonising the larger 
spiritual interests with the contemporary state of 
scientifically verified experience. And the religious 
value of his doctrine — in awakening the mind to 
ideal issues, in lifting it to a high moral plane and 
sustaining it there — he attested by his own life and 
conduct. But the churches would have none of it. 
His own excommunicated him, and the others, what- 
ever their differences, agreed in this, that Spinoza 
was " a systematic atheist." 



IX 

A century and a half passed, and then there arose 
within the Protestant church a spiritual descendant 
of Spinoza, who, more than any other individual, 
inaugurated that renascence of theological recon- 
struction, which, after a century of ebb and flow, is 
now perhaps approaching full tide. The keynote of 
this renascence — on its positive and constructive 
side — is Schleiermacher's arresting utterance that, 

assistance of Moral Philosophy and the Theory of Education ; 
further, as health is no insignificant means for attaining our end, 
we must also include the whole science of Medicine, and, as 
many difficult things are by contrivance rendered easy, and we 
can in this way gain much time and convenience, the science of 
Mechanics must in no way be despised. But, before all things, 
a means must be devised for improving the understanding, and 
purifying it, as far as may be at the outset, so that it may appre- 
hend things without error, and in the best possible way." 

141 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

" If our view of the world is defective our notions of 
Deity will not advance beyond the mythological stage!* 
Here is Spinozism concentrated into a single sen- 
tence. The significance of that utterance is great, 
for its endorsement by the advanced wing of the 
Theological Group is an implicit invitation to an 
alliance with the Scientific and Historical Groups. 

To talk of alliances is to think of diplomacy. Now 
diplomacy, being a methodological device of the 
Politician, is distrusted by the plain man. But there 
is a way by which diplomacy may be subtly trans- 
muted into an ideal instrument of peaceful negotia- 
tion. And that is by reversing the customary usage 
of the Formalist. Let the diplomatist expose the 
weakness of his own case, and expound the strength 
of his opponent's. Then if the opponent is an ideal- 
ist, he will not be outdone in magnanimity. He will 
promptly discover and reveal unsuspected weaknesses 
in his own case, and unseen strength in his rival's. 
At worst, this idealist usage of diplomacy will serve 
as a touchstone of character. Should it happen that 
your opponent turns out to be psychologically a 
formalist, then you are at once informed of the fact. 
For he will accept your rendering of the situation 
and immediately propose a treaty on the basis of it. 
The formalist thus having revealed himself, it is then 
that the idealist knows he must requisition all the 
courage and resource of which he is capable, for, 
assuredly, he has to do with a mortal enemy. 

Now this essay, professing to be written from the 
point of view of other groups (for the most part the 
scientific and the historical) than the religious, has 

142 



A Sociological Approach 

purposely emphasised their defects. And what has 
been said in recognition of merits has been little 
more than the admission that there is discoverable 
in the functional activities of each group, an intru- 
sive religious element — the idealising tendency. And 
the thesis has been diplomatically maintained that 
this intrusive religious element is the chief factor in 
converting group or sectional activity into socialising 
action. It is the advantage of this sort of diplomacy 
that while retaining courtesy it does not divorce 
truth. 



X 

What space remains will be devoted to a cursory 
indication of the sociological strength of the religious 
position. The group which occupationally represents 
religion is the Priesthood, and the strength of their 
case, sociologically, lies in their historic contribution 
to what might be called the Great Psychic Lift of the 
Race. 

The psychological division of priestly types into 
formalist and idealist has a sociological significance 
somewhat different from the corresponding division in 
the other groups. This derives from the primitive- 
ness of the distinction in the religious group. It is 
historically and genetically antecedent to the corre- 
sponding distinction in the other groups. The har- 
monisation of ideal and form is, morally viewed, a 
phase of the relationship of Initiative to Custom, of 
Individuality to Society, of Variation to Heredity, of 
Progress to Order. All of these are aspects of a prob- 

143 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

lem of the most pressing practical importance, but 
theoretically beset with difficulties calculated to daunt 
any investigator but a hero or a fool. The moral 
aspect of the problem manifestly has the more im- 
mediate urgency. Hence it is, that an approximate 
working solution of this was long ago — more than 
two thousand years since — reached. This discovery, 
proclaimed by certain pioneers of, or connected with 
various religious groups, is the great spiritual achieve- 
ment of the race. It brought clearly into conscious- 
ness, for the first time in history, the possibility of 
a distinction between formalist and idealist types of 
personality. 

The formalist of religion is the ceremonialist par 
excellence. Now ceremonial consists first in the sym- 
bolisation of psychic states and processes, and sec- 
ondly in the systematisation of the symbolic data, 
with a view to routine. This definition, it may be 
objected, confuses ceremonial with art. It is, on the 
contrary, intended to bring the distinction into promi- 
nence. Art also is concerned with the symbolic rep- 
resentation of ideas and emotions, but with a view not 
to routine but to initiative. Art is primarily con- 
cerned with individuality, with initiative, with varia- 
tion, with progress, and secondarily with socialisation, 
with custom, with heredity, with order ; whereas the 
contrary is true of ceremonial. The psychic pro- 
ducts and processes of human evolution (Language 
and Literature, Science and the Fine Arts, Industrial 
aptitude and Religious capacity) have, in their earlier 
phases at least, been developed mainly by art and 
transmitted mainly by ceremonial. Art and ceremo- 

144 



A Sociological Approach 

nial may, from a certain standpoint, be regarded as 
sociological structures, corresponding to what psy- 
chologically is the function of educability; and edu- 
cability itself is, as Professor Ray Lankester has well 
shown, the psychological correlate of what biologi- 
cally is a surplusage of cerebral development beyond 
the needs of a material struggle for life. Thus cere- 
monial, in this large sense, may be considered as 
the root-stock out of which the several formalisms 
have grown, by a process in part evolutionary and in 
part degeneratory. Religious ceremonial largely pre- 
serves the primitive characteristics. 

In the mental evolution both of the race and of the 
individual, the distinction between structure and func- 
tion, between symbol and process, is very slow to rise 
into consciousness. In fact, the distinction is never 
complete. Even in the most illuminated minds, a 
prepossession persists of there being some irreducible 
element of identity. Witness the perennial recru- 
descence of the nominalist-realist controversy; and 
especially the fact that a form of that controversy is 
at the present moment agitating — of all people in 
the world — the mathematicians, in respect of the 
validity of mathematical proof. 

The ceremonialism of religion is differentiated — 
especially from the formalism of science — by two fea- 
tures. In the first place, it frankly recognises and 
builds upon the inexhaustible element of mystery 
in symbolism. In the second place, it is packed 
with survivals characteristic of those early phases of 
mental evolution when symbol and process, sign and 
thing signified, were regarded as practically identical. 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

It is a mistake to suppose that these psychological 
survivals of the age of myth and magic, in religious 
ceremonial, are now necessarily functionless. 

The aim of religious ceremonial is the inspiration 
and maintenance, in the mind of the individual, of a 
worshipful attitude towards what has received a social 
sanction of sacredness. In the selection of objects, 
qualities, relations, and persons to be regarded as 
sacred, the Priesthood has stood between two difficul- 
ties, on the one hand the progressiveness and insta- 
bility of the culture mind, and on the other, the 
unprogressiveness and stability of the folk mind. 
There thus arises the perennial theological prob- 
lem of combining two apparent incommensurables — 
" solidarity of salvation " and " a dynamic heaven." 
A practical solution by compromise was possible, as 
long as the priests were the only organised repre- 
sentatives of spiritual interests, and other cultural 
groups like the philosophical, literary, historical, 
and scientific had not yet been differentiated, or 
had only been partially differentiated from the social 
body. 

The Priesthood being the only representatives of 
cultural interests, it was possible to experimentally 
maintain an esoteric doctrine, and as its coherence 
and adaptability became more fully verified, gradually 
transmit it to the folk-mind by successive modifica- 
tions of sanctioned creed or formula and ceremonial 
observance, accompanied by an explanation of these, 
usually exoteric, yet not without hints and devel- 
opments of higher meanings. It was under this 
spiritual regime that there was achieved the advance 

146 



A Sociological Approach 

characterised above as the Great Psychic Lift of the 
Race. 

Mr. Stuart Glennie appears to have been the first 
to call attention to the synchronism and similarity of 
a series of religious revolutions occurring between the 
seventh and the fifth century B. c. amongst the more 
advanced peoples from China to Italy, and associated 
in historic tradition especially with such names as 
Isaiah, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius and 
Laotse. 1 

There was then made an organised endeavour to 
introduce into popular worship those principles 
which constitute the great spiritual discovery of the 
race. To call this great moment the advent of the 
Psychology of Idealism would be to apply to an 
apparently empirical event of the ancient world, the 
distinctive nomenclature of modern philosophy, pro- 
fessedly rational. But that anachronism may be 
pardoned, if it aids in the comprehension of the 
revolutionary moral change implied in an advance 

1 J. Stuart Glennie, " The New Philosophy of History? 
1873, pp. 208-216 and 384-401. It is a pleasure to be able to 
call attention to this — one of many innovating researches by a 
writer, the importance and originality of whose work in History 
and Philosophy are far from being adequately recognised. The 
particular discovery of Mr. Glennie here instanced would 
seem to be now generally taken as verified. In reference to 
the simultaneity of this great moral revolution in different and 
widely separated civilisations, Professor Rhys Davids in u Bud- 
dhist India" (1902), p. 239, asks: " Is there a more stupendous 
marvel in the whole history of mankind? Does anymore sug- 
gestive problem await the solution of the historian of human 
thought ? " 

147 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

from an External Religion of Custom to an Internal 
Religion of Conscience. In respect of canons of 
sanctity, it meant a change in the assessment of 
sacred values, in the direction of substituting idealist 
criteria for formalist or ceremonialist criteria. 1 

Great advances in mental and moral progress were 
an obvious and necessary preliminary to any attempts 
to substitute a religion of internal sanction, based on 
human idealism, for a religion of external sanction, 
based on magic and myth. Before any consciously 
organised endeavour towards such a revolution could 
be even attempted, several great psychological and 
sociological discoveries had need to be made. The 
spiritual truths then empirically reached have been 
more or less verified by modern scientific investiga- 
tion. Stated dogmatically and in modern terminol- 
ogy, they may be put as follows: (i) The ultimate 
criterion of social well-being is to be sought in the 
psychic life of the individual ; (2) The psychic life 
of the individual ranks in sanctity in proportion to 
its response to social ideals grown up in History, or 
created by Art, — religion thus acting repressively 
and negatively in subordinating the individual to the 
community, positively and educationally in develop- 
ing the unique personal aptitudes of the individual 

1 A commonplace example of the surviving practice of assess- 
ing sacred values by formalist or ceremonialist criteria is the 
custom of snobbery. The modern reverence of social rank is 
in obvious continuity with certain forms of taboo in primitive 
religion. Whatever its use in early civilisation, its manifesta- 
tion in contemporary western society is interpretable, psycho- 
logically, as a misjudgment of sanctity. 

148 



A Sociological Approach 

in the service of the community; (3) Ceremonial is 
mainly, if not exclusively, methodological in char- 
acter; (4) Religious ceremonial has, (a) a commem- 
orative function, in preserving social ideals, (b) an 
initiatory function, in awakening the mind of the 
individual to the ideals of the race, (c) a routine 
function, in sustaining conduct at a high social level 
of thought and conduct; (5) The chief dynamic of 
creative idealism (that is, of spiritual progress) is (a) 
in the early stage of life, individual and racial, the 
sex element, which in later stages of life, individual 
and racial, develops into emotions and conceptions 
of, (b) family (the domestication of the individual), 
and of (c) society and humanity (socialisation of the 
individual). 

The question of the origin of these great truths is 
complicated by the fact that apparently at about the 
time the psychic evolution of the race had, in its fore- 
most manifestations, reached these levels, there were 
beginning to be differentiated other cultural groups 
than the priestly one. This was particularly so in 
China, India, and Greece. But the credit of the long 
and arduous preliminary preparation belongs — in so 
far as it belongs to any group — to the occupational 
representatives of religious interests, the Priesthood. 
A more important question, however, than the origin 
of the discoveries, is the use that has been made of 
them in the intervening historical period. 

In the movement of civilisation during 'the past two 
millenniums and a half, there have been vast migrations 
of peoples, there have been advancing and reactionary 
phases of human thought and activity, there have 

149 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

been ascent and decline, progress and recession, 
evolution and degeneration. Everywhere, and at all 
times, the priestly, like other social groups, has ab- 
sorbed and reflected the tone and temper of their 
epoch, their race, their country, their times. Thus 
there have been many creeds, and many variations of 
the same creed. But amongst the civilised peoples 
of the West, there has seldom been a time when the 
Priests have not proved to be the guardians of the 
principles of the great primary religious revolution, 
and indeed sought to apply them, if not always in 
the spirit, then in the letter. 

The parallelism between the history of the race 
and the life of the individual only holds good psychi- 
cally up to a certain point. Every individual, as we 
know with increasing clearness and certainty from 
the nascent science of Child-Study, is born into a 
world of myth, magic, and unsocialised desires. It 
is not every one, it is, in some generations appar- 
ently, only a select few, who individually participate 
in the great psychic lift of the race. If any given 
society is to be kept free of survivals of the lower 
pre-revolutionary psychic type, the spiritual revolu- 
tion of the race must be repeated afresh in each 
individual life. But to effect that is apparently a task 
vastly beyond the culture-apparatus of even the best 
equipped nations. Count, as not only the churches, 
but as all other culture-institutions have been willing 
to do, the multitudes of merely ceremonial adhe- 
rences or even " conversions," and there remain, in 
the most civilised of nations, still greater multitudes 
of the unawakened, the unsocialised. 



A Sociological Approach 

There is no denying a strong and general tendency 
for the individual in his personal development to stop 
far short of the higher spiritual stages of racial evolu- 
tion. This, looked at from the point of view of 
origins, — which is the characteristic attitude of Sci- 
ence, — has the appearance of being an arrestment of 
development, or a reversion to archaic type. Looked 
at from the point of view of social achievement and 
human consummation, — which is the characteristic 
attitude of Religion, — it has the appearance of being 
a fall from an idealist state. The remedial practical 
measures dictated by the latter point of view are of 
the nature of salvation and regeneration. The prac- 
tical remedial measures that ensue from the former 
point of view, what are they? The confession has to 
be made that hitherto Science, in so far as it is bio- 
logical and human, has been so fully occupied with 
theoretical questions of generation and degeneration 
as to have had little time for the practical problems 
of regeneration. That is doubtless an apology that 
many scientists would offer. But the truth is, it is, 
on the part of the Scientists, not time that has been 
wanting, but inclination. The idealists in the scien- 
tific group have been too few to adequately leaven 
the collective mass. In many of the social groups, 
and notably in those of Science and History, the 
characteristic functional activities of the group have 
normally been determined by the formalist members. 
And these formalist members are themselves, from 
the large psychic standpoint of racial evolution, un- 
awakened, unsocialised types. They are themselves 
survivals of that archaic spiritual regime which be- 

151 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

longs to a Religion of Custom. They remain unre- 
sponsive to the higher racial ideals. Nowhere has 
the need of religious observance been so much re- 
pudiated as in the scientific group. And nowhere 
has the worship of methodological group idols been 
more devoutly observed. 

The formalist or ceremonialist pre-social type is 
plentifully and at all times found in positions of 
authority and leadership in every group, not exclud- 
ing the ecclesiastical. The regeneration of this idola- 
trous or heathen type (as it might be called) is a 
social problem greatly complicated by the facility 
with which the formalist wing of the Priestly Group 
detaches itself for a temporary alliance with the 
formalists of any, or all other groups. The ecclesias- 
tical, like other groups, has occasional recourse to 
that primitive protest of moral inertia, — the stoning 
of the idealists. And when the formalists of all seven 
groups combine and join their forces, then is the 
work of the Devil consummated. 

Well-organised formalist aggregates (slightly adul- 
terated with idealism) of selected types for educa- 
tional purposes are practically what makes up a 
University; the conservatism familiar in such institu- 
tions thus becomes clearly explained. The perma- 
nent idealist element in a University is customarily 
concealed on the remote shelves of the Library. By 
good luck, the student sometimes finds it; it would 
of course always find the student, if the University 
were actively alive. Universities are saved from spir- 
itual sterility (or worse), in part by the occasional 
presence of an exceptional teacher, but chiefly by the 

152 



A Sociological Approach 

bare biological fact that there is a never-failing per- 
centage of undergraduates whom not even degrees 
and scholarships can keep away from the sources of 
culture. 

If for no other purpose than to meet the always 
latent, and academically patent, combination of inter- 
group formalism against the higher spiritual interests, 
it behoves the idealists of every group to pool their 
resources, to act in concert, or at least in mutual 
support when possible, and this not only in ordinary 
life, but in education, in all its agencies and at all its 
levels. Happily the difficulties are less than at first 
sight they seem, in the way of such spiritual alliances, 
such co-operative campaigns on behalf of the uni- 
versal interest and stake of mankind in the fortunes 
of idealism upon this planet and in our time. Occu- 
pational jealousy, vested interests, traditional routine, 
social caste, are all things that count, but they count 
least where the interests of idealism are concerned. 
And, moreover, as closer personal observation is 
made of the idealist wing of each group, it is seen 
that there is a far larger commingling of individuals 
than is commonly supposed. Wherever different 
groups converge in society to a common centre, and 
in thought to their common source (as they do in the 
unity of the individual life), there is a freer circula- 
tion here of ideals, there also of idealists. The 
nearer the individual gets to the elemental sources of 
experience, the wider is the possible range of sympa- 
thetic understanding. But some personal participa- 
tion in the characteristic activities of many and varied 
groups is necessary for each of us severally, if we seek 

i53 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

to cultivate sympathetic understanding, at any rate 
up to the point of creative idealism. Does not this 
actuality of personal participation in the characteristic 
life-experience of other, and if possible of every 
typical group, lie at the very root of the psychology 
of idealism? How otherwise is it possible to pre- 
serve in the life of the individual that all-round 
functioning of the entire being which Biology insists 
upon as Health, and Psychology as Sanity, which 
Philosophy seeks as Synthesis, Ethics as Sympathy, 
and which Religion, reversing this order and starting 
from Love, co-ordinates and idealises as Holiness? 

Is there not here a basis of common organisation 
for the meeting and alliance of the idealists of all 
groups? 

XI 

THE whole preceding analysis and criticism of group 
activities, and the distinction of formal and vital among 
these, may now be summed up and the suggested so- 
ciological approach to a unification of scientific and 
religious ideals may now also be summarised in the 
following diagram. This, it will be observed, is a 
development of that on page 106 with which we set 
out. 

Not only the thesis of the essay, but also its practi- 
cal application, will be manifest from an inspection 
of the diagram. The practical policy obviously re- 
vealed in this: Let the Religious Idealists, purging 
themselves of formalism, laying aside desanctified 
ceremonialism, take the lead in combining the Natu- 

154 



A Sociological Approach 

ralists, the Workers, the Humanists, the Education- 
ists, the Evolutionists, and the Sages into one joint 
movement for the awakening of the Young, for the 




salving of the Degenerate, for the conversion of the 
Unregenerate. And the diagram also conspicuously 
shows in what quarters amongst the adult popula- 
tion the Unregenerate are to be searched for and 
found. 

iS5 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

It may be pardoned to the writer to say to those 
who are contemplating a practical step towards a mu- 
tual understanding, that a common ground for the 
discussion of inter-group interests is afforded by the 
Sociological Society recently formed in London. 

VICTOR V. BRANFORD. 

5 Old Queen Street, 
Westminster, S. W. 



156 



T 



AN ETHICAL APPROACH 

HON. BERTRAND RUSSELL 

Author of H The Principles of Mathematics" etc. 

O Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told 
the history of the Creation, saying: 



" The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to 
grow wearisome ; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise ? 
Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be 
more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be wor- 
shipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled in- 
wardly, and resolved that the great drama should be 
performed. 

" For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly 
through space. At length it began to take shape, the cen- 
tral mass threw off planets, the planets cooled, boiling seas 
and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from black 
masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid 
crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of 
the ocean, and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth 
into vast forest trees, huge ferns springing from the damp 
mould, sea monsters breeding, fighting, devouring, and 
passing away. And from the monsters, as the play un- 
folded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the 
knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for wor- 
ship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad mon- 
strous world, that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a 
few brief moments of life before Death's inexorable decree. 

*57 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

And Man said : ' There is a hidden purpose, could we but 
fathom it, and the purpose is good ; for we must reverence 
something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy 
of reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, re- 
solving that God intended harmony to come out of chaos 
by human efforts. And when he followed the instincts, 
which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of 
beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive 
him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, 
until he invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was 
to have been appeased. And, seeing the present was bad, 
he made it yet worse, that thereby the future might be 
better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that 
enabled him to forego even the joys that were possible. 
And God smiled ; and when he saw that man had become 
perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun 
through the sky, which crashed into Man's sun ; and all 
returned again to nebula." 

" ' Yes,' he murmured, ' it was a good play, I will have it 
performed again.' " 

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more 
void of meaning, is the world which Science presents 
for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our 
ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is 
the product of causes which had no prevision of the 
end they were achieving ; that his origin, his growth, 
his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but 
the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms ; that 
no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feel- 
ing, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; 
that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all 
the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human 

158 



An Ethical Approach 

genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of 
the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's 
achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the 
debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not 
quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that 
no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. 
Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on 
the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the 
soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. 

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so 
powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations 
untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, 
omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secu- 
lar hurryings through the abysses of space, has 
brought forth at last a child, subject still to her 
power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good 
and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works 
of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the 
mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet 
free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, 
to know, and in imagination to create. To him 
alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this 
freedom belongs ; and in this lies his superiority to 
the resistless forces that control his outward life. 

The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of 
his impotence before the powers of Nature; but, hav- 
ing in himself nothing that he respects more than 
Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his 
gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of 
his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long 
history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and 
human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the 

i59 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

jealous gods : surely, the trembling believer thinks, 
when what is most precious has been freely given, 
their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will 
not be required. The religion of Moloch — as such 
creeds may be generically called — is in essence the 
cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even 
in his heart, allow the thought that his master de- 
serves no adulation. Since the independence of 
ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely 
worshipped, and receives an unlimited respect despite 
its wanton infliction of pain. 

But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim 
of the ideal world begins to be felt; and worship, if 
it is not to cease, must be given to gods of another 
kind than those created by the savage. Some, 
though they feel the demands of the ideal, will still 
consciously reject them, urging that naked Power is 
worthy of worship. Such is the attitude inculcated 
in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind : the 
divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the 
divine goodness there is no hint. Such, also, is 
the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their 
morality upon the struggle for survival, contending 
that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But 
others, not content with an answer so repugnant to the 
moral sense, will adopt the position which we have 
become accustomed to regard as specially religious, 
maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of 
fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. 
Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the 
mystic unity of what is and what should be. 

But the world of fact, after all, is not good ; and, in 
160 



An Ethical Approach 

submitting our judgment to it, there is an element of 
slavishness, from which our thoughts must be purged. 
For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of 
Man, by freeing him, as far as possible, from the 
tyranny of non-human Power. When we have real- 
ised that Power is largely bad, that man, with his 
knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom 
in a world which has no such knowledge, the choice 
is again presented to us : Shall we worship Force, or 
shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist 
and be evil, or shall he be recognised as the creation 
of our own conscience? 

The answer to this question is very momentous, 
and affects profoundly our whole morality. The 
worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche 
and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is 
the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against 
a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission 
to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If strength 
indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the 
strength of those who refuse that false " recognition 
of facts " which fails to recognise that facts are often 
bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there 
are many things that would be better otherwise, and 
that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are 
not realised in the realm of matter. Let us preserve 
our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of per- 
fection which life does not permit us to attain, though 
none of those things meet with the approval of the 
unconscious universe. If power is bad, as it seems to 
be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies 
Man's true freedom: in determination to worship 
n 161 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

only the God created by our own love of the good, 
to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight 
of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must 
submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces ; 
but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from 
our fellow-men, free from the petty planet on which 
our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, 
from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that 
energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in 
the vision of the good ; and let us descend, in action, 
into the world of fact, with that vision always before 
us. 

When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows 
fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of 
the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom. 
To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile universe, 
to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to 
refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, 
appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before 
the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for 
it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil 
world; and in the fierceness of desire from which re- 
bellion springs, there is a kind of self-assertion which 
it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indigna- 
tion is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our 
desires ; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists 
is found in the submission of our desires, but not of 
our thoughts. From the submission of our desires 
springs the virtue of resignation ; from the freedom 
of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and 
philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, 
we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision 

162 



An Ethical Approach 

of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, 
to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes ; 
and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer 
ask of life that it shall yield them any of those per- 
sonal goods that are subject to the mutations of 
Time. 

Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence 
of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in preaching 
it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Prome- 
thean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted 
that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove 
impossible, are yet real goods ; others, however, as 
ardently longed for, do not form part of a fully puri- 
fied ideal. The belief that what must be renounced 
is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false 
than untamed passion supposes ; and the creed of 
religion, by providing a reason for proving that it is 
never false, has been the means of purifying our 
hopes by the discovery of many austere and priceless 
truths. 

But there is in resignation a further good element : 
even real goods, when they are unattainable, ought 
not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes, 
sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the 
young, there is nothing unattainable ; a good thing, 
desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and 
yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by 
death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, 
we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not 
made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the 
things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. 
It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to 

163 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn 
away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of 
submission to Power is not only just and right: it is 
the very gate of wisdom. 

But passive renunciation is not the whole of wis- 
dom ; for not by renunciation alone can we build a 
temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting 
foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm 
of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the 
untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden 
sunset magic of limpid lyrics, where beauty shines 
and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote 
from the fear of change, remote from the failures and 
disenchantments of the world of fact. In the con- 
templation of these things the vision of heaven will 
shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone 
to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by 
which to fashion to our needs whatever is not incapa- 
ble of serving as a stone in the sacred shrine. At 
times of such inspiration we seem to hear the strange, 
deep music of an invisible sea, beating ceaselessly 
upon an unknown shore. Could we but stand on 
that shore, we feel, another vision of life might be 
ours, wider, freer, than the narrow valley in which our 
private life is prisoned. 

Except for those rare spirits that are born without 
sin, there is a cavern of darkness to be traversed 
before that ocean can be seen. The gate of the cav- 
ern is despair, and its floor is paved with the grave- 
stones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; 
there the eagerness, the greed, of untamed desire 
must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from 

164 



An Ethical Approach 

the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the Gate of 
Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, 
by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new 
tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim's heart. 
When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, 
we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward 
rule of Fate, and to recognise that the non-human 
world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible 
at last so to transform and re-fashion the unconscious 
universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagi- 
nation, that a new image of shining gold replaces the 
old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the 
world — in the visual shapes of trees and mountains 
and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in 
the very omnipotence of Death — the insight of 
creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty 
which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind 
asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces 
of nature. The more evil the material with which it 
deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the 
greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant 
rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its 
victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the 
pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is 
the proudest, the most triumphant ; for it builds its 
shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's 
country, on the very summit of his highest mountain ; 
from its impregnable watch-towers, his camps and 
arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed ; 
within its walls the free life continues, while the 
legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the 
servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of 

165 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy 
those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on 
that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave 
warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have 
preserved for us the priceless heritage of liberty, 
and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the 
home of the unsubdued. 

But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible 
a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is 
present always and everywhere in life. In the spec- 
tacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, 
and in the irrevocability of a vanished past, there is 
a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the 
vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of 
existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of 
pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds 
of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all 
eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and 
striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial 
things that, to a superficial view, make up the com- 
mon life of day by day; we see, surrounding the 
narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human 
comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves 
we toss for a brief hour ; from the great night without 
a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge ; all the loneli- 
ness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated 
upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, 
with what of courage it can command, against the 
whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its 
hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the 
powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the 
glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into 

166 



An Ethical Approach 

the overmastering beauty of human existence. From 
that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, 
renunciation, wisdom, and charity are born ; and with 
their birth a new life begins. Those who have passed 
through that valley of darkness emerge at last into a 
country of unearthly beauty, where the air is calm, 
and the pale sun coldly illumines a frosty landscape ; 
and there the deep-toned psean of freedom vibrates in 
the soul that has conquered fear. To take into the 
inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose 
puppets we seem to be — Death and change, the 
irrevocability of the past, and the powerlessness of 
man before the blind hurry of the universe from 
vanity to vanity — to feel these things and know 
them is to conquer them. 

This is the reason why the Past has such magical 
power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pic- 
tures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when 
the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, 
still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past 
does not change or strive ; like Duncan, after life's fit- 
ful fever it sleeps well ; what was eager and grasping, 
what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the 
things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it 
like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not 
worthy of it, is unendurable ; but to a soul which has 
conquered Fate it is the key of religion. 

The life of man, viewed outwardly, is but a small 
thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The 
slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, 
because they are greater than anything he finds in 
himself, and because all his thoughts are of things 

167 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

which they devour. But, great as they are, to think 
of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is 
greater still. And such thought makes us free men ; 
we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental 
subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of 
ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private hap- 
piness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, 
to burn with passion for eternal things — this is 
emancipation, and this is the free man's worship. 
And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of 
Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which 
leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of 
Time. 

United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all 
ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds 
that a new vision is with him always, shedding over 
every daily task the golden light of love. The life of 
man is a long march through the night, surrounded 
by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, 
towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where 
none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, 
our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the 
silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the 
time in which we can help them, in which their 
happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed 
sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by 
the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a 
never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, 
to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh 
in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let 
us think only of their need — of the sorrows, the dif- 
ficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the 

168 



An Ethical Approach 

misery of their lives ; let us remember that they are 
fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the 
same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their 
day is over, when their good and their evil have 
become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it 
ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they 
failed, no deed of ours was the cause ; but wherever 
a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we 
were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with 
brave words in which high courage glowed. 

Brief and powerless is man's life ; on him and all 
his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless and dark. 
Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omni- 
potent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, 
condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow 
himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it re- 
mains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty 
thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the 
coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the 
shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by 
the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from 
the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; 
proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, 
for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, 
to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the 
world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the 
trampling march of unconscious power. 

BERTRAND RUSSELL. 



169 



AN EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 
A TECHNICAL APPROACH 

PROFESSOR PATRICK GEDDES 

University Hall-, Edinburgh 



THE approach to common ideals through educa- 
tion may not at first sight seem the most promis- 
ing one. Education seems rather to divide us than to 
unite; yet our own Churchman and Nonconformist 
exhibit but the mildest domestic differences com- 
pared with the fiercer almost revolutionary strife of 
clerical and anti-clerical education upon the conti- 
nent. So self-contained these days are the great 
nations that we may have strongly contrasted move- 
ments on opposite sides of a narrow frontier : witness 
England strengthening her Church schools, while 
France is suppressing the teaching of her religious 
orders. 

Under such circumstances and in such times, how 
can the religious and the secular teacher find any 
common ground without the abandonment of one or 
other characteristic standpoint? Yet are they not 
agreed in aim, at least so far as this can be quite 
generally stated? However each may upbraid the 
other with self-seeking, and though the cynic may 
sometimes group the new endowment of research 

170 



A Educational Approach 

with the old search of endowment, still there are 
gentler moods in which each critic must surely 
sometimes sympathise with the other as a well-mean- 
ing and hard-working professional brother, struggling 
to communicate to a reluctant generation what seems 
to him the broadest truth, the deepest beauty, the 
highest good of which he knows. But within this 
general agreement our respective interpretations of 
nature and man may and do differ profoundly; our 
thought regarding the mystery behind these is no 
less different ; our ideas therefore of the self, of so- 
ciety, and of the meaning and use of life, must there- 
fore differ also. Hence it is not to be wondered at 
that one school of educationists should desire and 
strive to overpower and replace the other. To be of 
any use, then, our Eirenikon must go further and 
deeper than we have yet done. 

Not merely to avoid wounding sentiment at home, 
nor for the sake of the fresh eye, with its help 
towards more completely escaping from our own 
bias, but because of the present sharpness of the 
contrast of clerical and lay, let us speak for a little 
of French schools rather than of British ones, and 
make the acquaintance of one or two of these, as we 
may so easily do upon a holiday. These might be 
chosen anywhere, but say for preference in Brittany, 
where the feud of clerical and anti-clerical has run 
fiercest. The two types of teacher are at first glance 
distinguishable enough, in face and bearing as in 
costume; while the schoolroom of each bears no 
less distinctly its sacred or secular label. 

The state teacher and his friends vigorously sum 
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Ideals of Science and Faith 

up for us all the criticisms of the Left upon the 
Right. They remind us of the essential points of 
the case against the education of the Church, its 
obscurantism in science, its reaction in practical af- 
fairs. Its stand for Ptolemy against Copernicus and 
Galileo, for Aristotle or at best with Linnaeus against 
Darwin, is vigorously brought up. Still worse is 
its long maintenance of feudal privilege against 
modern freedom, its more than lingering sympathies 
despite all democratic concessions. Most strongly 
of all is urged the deadening effect upon young 
intellect of its dogmatic instruction, of its inculcation 
of authority against reason, the darkening effect of 
setting sentiment against science. Leaving criticism 
and passing to construction, our interlocutor con- 
cludes with a lucid and persuasive exposition of the 
need and value of each of the positive sciences, of 
the claims of practical life and industry, of modern 
citizenship ; and all this with a clearness and force 
which remind us of Mr. Spencer's " Education." 

Repressing some temptation to be satisfied with 
this as obviously sufficient, we hear the other side. 
Its fervid restatement of Catholic ideals, its lamenta- 
tions over the religious indifference of the State and 
of the times may leave us comparatively cold ; and 
who is not indifferent when compared with the 
Breton? But our attention becomes more keenly 
roused by the remark that even if the State schools 
be at present somewhat superior in scientific infor- 
mation and outfit, their own have the advantage in 
manners and in morals. More pointed still seems 
the criticism that the State schools are designed and 

172 



An Educational Approach 

inspired essentially from the standpoint of an inexor- 
able logic, applied and supervised with a relentless 
uniformity ; and that they disregard not simply the 
general course of history as the Church understands 
it, but the actual regional conditions, types, and tem- 
peraments as even the geographer understands these ; 
so tending to flatten out all that we think and find 
most characteristic and most admirable in Breton 
life into a dull and dreary reflection of Parisian uni- 
formity. To this too purely urban and intellec- 
tualist education is ably traced a large influence in 
the depopulation of the village, the too frequent 
demoralisation of its character, of course with a 
corresponding depression of agriculture. In fact 
this indictment of the prevalent State education is, 
though in different ways, more severe and sweeping 
than that of the Republican against the Church. 
And putting the two pleadings side by side, do we 
not feel that each side largely merits the criticisms 
made against it by the other? Or looking at both 
constructively, we see that each has a partial ideal, 
and in so far a good one. 

It is natural to begin with the former, the observa- 
tion of our neighbours' defects being always easier 
than the recognition of their virtues. As we ramble 
on through town after town, village after village, and 
look about us at the schools of both kinds, does 
there not grow up the idea not only of their teachers 
as hard-working, well-intentioned, kindly folk alike, 
but of their work as being too much a dismal, futile 
child-imprisonment, singsong of reading-book in the 
one being, after all, so very much like singsong of 

i73 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

catechism in the other. Does it really matter very 
much, though in the one school there be a feeble 
lithograph of a sacred picture, and in the other an 
ugly icon of a sacred president? — that the one room 
be a little more tawdry, the other a little more 
dreary, if the decoration of both be bad anyhow? 
Does it matter either to religion or to science 
whether the children are learning by rote the names 
of ancient saintly personages for the bishop, or the 
names of chemical elements for the inspector? Is 
the bishop — "Monseigneur " of whom the Church 
schoolmaster speaks with bated breath so very dif- 
ferent from " Monsieur l'lnspecteur " who evidently 
inspires a still deeper if less spiritual dread on the 
part of his lay rival? For it is plain that neither 
one teacher nor the other knows that which has 
given the German professor his dignity, his world- 
pre-eminent efficiency; his independence, his " Lehr- 
freiheit," his freedom from inspection and supervision 
and criticism by any official authority whatsoever ; 
his responsibility therefore to his peers and to his 
pupils, but most of all to inward ideals, to truth, pro- 
gress, and the general weal. 

Even the most convinced protestant and liberal of 
our party, to whom the existence cf any monastic 
vows seems an anachronism of the worst sort, may 
begin to wonder if it is altogether an advantage to have 
the very same triple vows now practically imposed 
by the State. For is poverty so much more desirable 
or beneficial when externally compelled instead of 
voluntarily accepted? In the same way celibacy, for 
the average schoolmistress at least, is practically 

i74 



An Educational Approach 

maintained, though no longer from an internal vow ; 
while obedience to hierarchical superiors, as definite 
as ever it can have been, is admittedly inspired by 
dread of destitution. 

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, it is true, are written 
upon the school buildings in letters fair to see ; but 
as the teacher grows older he sees that after each the 
static full stop, the ironic "point" may be added. 
For liberty is exactly what he is not allowed ; equal- 
ity with his hierarchical superior is not even dreamed 
of; and fraternity of combination with his fellows is 
not possible. Nor probably on the whole is that 
promotion to a larger sphere of usefulness, which is 
the legitimate ambition of every efficient worker, 
more easily satisfied in the State schools than in the 
ecclesiastical ones. For in the Church, promotion is 
possible from the village up towards Rome ; but in 
the State the promoted come down from Paris. The 
teacher is growing conscious of his lot; witness the 
success of " Jean Coste." " We feel a little tired, 
sometimes," says to me the dean of the leading 
faculty in one of the greatest of provincial univer- 
sities, " of always being governed as a conquered 
country by two million Parisians." 

As we go into these matters further we find that 
the tide of opinion has turned, so they may soon be 
mending fast. As France has commonly been the 
first of countries to evolve each new system of tem- 
poral and spiritual ideals, or at any rate to express 
these most clearly, and most rapidly and logically to 
work them out to their fullest development, even 
their bitterest end, so she, naturally next experienc- 

175 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

ing all their evils, begins earliest or most clearly the 
reaction against them, and to think of construction 
anew. Hence, especially during the last decade, it 
has been coming about that the secular teachers are 
more and more turning to the education of the spirit- 
ual life, as the wide and ever-widening circulation of 
a paper like the Bulletin pour V Action Morale may 
show ; while it is no less the fact that in social science 
at least the " clerical " schoolmasters are often think- 
ing their way practically ahead of their Positivist 
antagonists, much more of our rival political econo- 
mists, our British or American Spencerians. As in- 
stance, witness the books of M. Demolins, himself 
but a foremost yet partial expositor of the larger 
influence of Le Play. 

So deep and so spreading are these changes among 
the younger generation in each party that they may 
have their unseen share in the present intensifications 
of strife between their older leaders. The " Principes 
de '89" the bureaucracy of the Napoleonic period, 
are still in power, and seem to stand as sharply con- 
trasted as ever with the old dogmatism of the Ultra- 
montanes ; but is it not just because both parties are 
old, are nearing their end, that they have thus em- 
bittered and exasperated each other into open war? 
Instances of this are not wanting either in political 
or religious history. 

Repressing, then, as far as may be, our national 
habit of thanking God that we are not as these French- 
men, let us come back to look with a freshened eye 
at our own machinery. Until a generation ago, 
people used to cite as one such awful example of 

176 



An Educational Approach 

French ways the story of some minister of education 
pulling out his watch and saying: "At this moment 
every child in France is saying the same lesson." 
But what else was the aim of our own codes and time- 
tables, only now relaxing? Are we not reminded of 
the bitter word of Metternich, " When you Eng- 
lish become bureaucratic, you become the most 
mechanical of all " ? For who that knows and cares 
anything for education can look back over British 
history for the last thirty years and not see as its 
representative and organising type, in that sense its 
true " Hero," a certain Robert Lowe, Lord Sher- 
brooke? But we see him now as having been essen- 
tially a tardy French bureaucrat, concretely importing 
the centralising hierarchy, the examination-machine, 
the inspectorial steam-roller, although no doubt im- 
parting to all these a due local colour ; thus for in- 
stance more perfectly adapting Napoleonised France 
to mammonised England, by help of his characteris- 
tic invention of" payment by results." The ingenuity 
of this principle has never, perhaps, been sufficiently 
appreciated. It was not merely an ingenious combi- 
nation of current economics with lay catechism-mon- 
gering, but involved a further complexity, that of the 
incorporation of the formerly solely ecclesiastical 
crime of simony with the formerly merely domestic 
crime of baby farming, and then nationalising the 
whole as a junior state religion. It is true, of course, 
that this system has lately been transformed, though 
not yet its moral results ; for while the centralisation 
and hierarchic depression of the general body of the 
educational profession is still no less thoroughly en- 
i3 i 77 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

sured, the effects of serfdom cannot be cancelled by 
even the most generous ukase. 

What is this whole national education-machine but 
essentially a new priestcraft, with its multitude of 
working Levites at the bottom, and its well-to-do 
scribes in their boards and education offices at the 
top? And to such a neo-ecclesiastical organisation 
what matters any lay administrative council, be it of 
school board or county council, since anyhow mainly 
of amateur lawyers, absorbed and controlled by the 
letter of their code, and so without having the time, 
even had they the purpose and knowledge, the sym- 
pathy and insight to approach the realities of educa- 
tion at all, or to encourage teachers or children to 
do so? 

Who, then, can seriously deny that the essentials of 
the characteristic forms of modern education, as yet 
most in power either abroad or at home — are not 
deeply akin to those they have been wont to complain 
of in past religious organisations? Might not this be 
traced into details, beginning with the grim asceti- 
cism, the worse than cloister-like dulness of the 
gardenless schoolyard cage, the shoving-yard or 
Hooliganeum, officially termed playground? That 
the monastic building is the expression of meditative 
abstraction from all interrupting sense stimulus, while 
the lay building has only the excuse of a sordid and 
shortsighted economy, does not surely improve the 
comparison? Again, in a Jesuit school the director 
could and did throw himself into the work of shaping 
the young life towards his ideal, sharpening reason, 
pointing will, and bringing feeling to the ice-brook's 

i 7 8 



An Educational Approach 

temper; but the modern board school headmaster is 
no longer entrusted with these powers. For a man, 
who despite State conditions has won his way to such 
high responsibility, might indeed master his school. 
So the subconscious self-preserving instinct of his 
bureaucratic superiors, who, however high officials, 
are at best but scholastic amateurs, naturally guides 
them to keep him occupied with clerkly details ; so 
that in many a higher grade school the rector at fifty 
corresponds precisely to a small child of five kept in, 
and relieving his solitude by marking X's and O's 
upon a gridiron of squares upon his ruled exercise 
book. It is no doubt expedient that this one man 
should die for these superior people. 

One more parallelism, this time of interest to the 
student of comparative religion, and we have done 
with this long opening of our subject. It is a re- 
markable evolution of our State education systems, 
nothing less than the reappearance of sham oracles. 
In common with other past faiths which had lost their 
internal light, their prophetic leading, and had fallen 
back upon books and codes, upon precedents and 
castes, an education authority is now accustomed to 
invoke on due occasions unseen and occult beings; 
so that when one asks them any question, the reply, 
be it of polite acquiescence or gentle evasion, of 
solemn nullity or obscurantist procrastination, as 
the case may be, is not couched and signed in the 
ordinary straightforward manner of man to man, as 
when one receives a communication from the colo- 
nial office or the like. It is majestic, oracular, as 
befits what comes from the occult beings afore- 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

said: " My Lords" (Adonai?) "have considered" 
this; "My Lords" (Elohim?) "have consulted" 
(doubtless Urim and Thummim) upon that; "My 
Lords have decided " (doubtless by the sacred 
method of lot, perhaps in its modern form of tossing 
up) ; and they " have the honour to be " — . How 
long, O Lord, how long shall these Things be? 

Harmless official formalities like so many more? 
Partly, perhaps. Even useful in a way, since preserv- 
ing order? Yes — maintaining the feelings which 
have so long kept school boards and schoolmasters 
in their respectively lower places. But to us out- 
siders — scientific men, workers, women of common 
sense, as to the teachers and even to the intelligent 
child, it none the less is at best a mode of bluff. But 
this is at once pretentious and timid — an ugly form 
of deceit that has now sufficiently had its day. 

Of course all this is not to say that an education 
office, a South Kensington, is a mere den of " budget- 
ivores," as the corresponding French gibe goes, or 
its individuals mere " ronds de cuir" — mere tops for 
stools, though some may develop that way. On 
the contrary we must fully recognise not only good 
men struggling with their bonds, but a certain hope 
and possibility in their organisation ; which may yet 
preserve all its usefulness and escape its evils. And 
if we be asked no longer to criticise merely, but to 
say how we would construct, the reply is clear — by 
transformation into the type as yet best represented 
by the United States Commissioner of Education and 
his department. For this represents the national 
educational consciousness and conscience: it is an 

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An Educational Approach 

intelligence department at once local, regional, nar 
tional and world-wide, and hence an agency of in- 
cessant and searching comparison and criticism, of 
diffusion of ideas, of practical impulse, or inspiring 
idealism also. With its keen criticism, its manifold 
suggestiveness, without the powers or ambitions of 
either that administrative or that financial control 
which characterise the education ministries of Eu- 
rope, but which are here happily impossible consti- 
tutionally, it is thus the best extant type of what a 
central and national institution for the advancement 
of education may and should be. Hence our own 
public interest in a small recent storm between the 
English Education Office and its Intelligence De- 
partment; whatever may have been the minor merits 
of the case, the two principles above discussed were 
here in conflict, the Napoleonic and the American, 
and the immediate victory of the first was thus intel- 
ligible enough. So, however, is the possible ultimate 
victory of the second. 

It is not the present question whether the apparatus 
of educational government — of which education 
offices have been taken merely as the largest and 
most prominent type, but to which, of course mutatis 
mutandis, we might add the public schools and the 
universities — can be transformed or no. The pur- 
pose of all this has been to bring out the essential 
identity in degeneration of educational ideals, whether 
they set out in modern times from the side of modern 
science and enlightenment, or in older days from that 
of religions. Be it in Church schools or in State 
ones, dry-rot is dry-rot still. 

181 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

So far this long discussion has been bringing out 
that the question before us is not really one of the 
conventional parties : it is not being solved by them ; 
it is not even being fully seen or treated. Whether 
the educationist is to wear the ecclesiastical cassock 
or the academic gown, the every-day business cos- 
tume, the laboratory jacket, or the workshop apron, 
is not the real question. That lies deeper ; it strips 
off each garment in turn, it sounds and tests the life 
below. 

I remember a saying attributed to the professor of 
divinity, which ran through the university like a crack 
through ice: "You ask me, What is a theologian? 
There are two sorts of theologians : those who have 
read the books of other theologians, and those who 
have had a spiritual experience." The essential, the 
ideal lies, then, not in the subject, in the faculty, or the 
profession, the occupation or specialism, not in this 
religion nor in that science ; it is in the inmost self, 
and in the measure and character of its action and 
reaction with the vital realities of the subject, what- 
ever that subject be. The eternal ideals may be 
reached by every road, are open upon it ; yet may 
be lost at every sign-post, despite the would-be plain- 
est lettering, even from one who had himself found 
the way. 

See this poor puzzled British parent, his no less 
puzzled boy, confused between the choice of " the 
classical or the modern side ; " little matter so long 
as in either bundle there is so little genuine and un- 
mouldered hay. If it is a choice between parroting 
the catechism or the list of chemical elements, Latin 

182 



An Educational Approach 

rules or French ones, Euclid instead of Natural 
Orders, and the Punic Wars instead of a " period " 
of English History, there is little wonder that the 
parent still prefers to accept the older, the classical 
side, as likely to be the less badly taught of the 
two, modern though his own interests generally are. 
Hence largely the reversion, nowadays so common, 
that of the son of the scientific or practical man, still 
making Latin verses: it is not a mere timid con- 
formity, a mere ritual of status. 

For there is no real difference : " plus ca change, 
plus c'est la meme chose. " This so-called science, 
this chemical analysis or flower-dissecting is still 
mostly mere spelling, mere parsing under a new 
name: most of this workshop exercising — too often 
nowadays fine finishing of wooden surfaces and 
joints, afterwards useless, and only fit to be burned 
— is even worse than the old Latin exercises which 
dulled and sickened and wasted our youth. For 
since we cannot live by Latin alone, on leaving 
school we could throw this aside, and still be fresh to 
learn to work; but when we have done with such 
workshop exercises, or won half the certificates of 
South Kensington " art " and " science " we never 
wish to touch plane or pencil, retort or scalpel again. 
There has been no one like your " technical educa- 
tionist " for breaking the spring of industry and art in 
the young life for good and all : even your botanist 
cannot more perfectly kill his subject for all con- 
cerned. 

Happily we are escaping from this period of static 
analysis, and we are all escaping together. The liv- 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

ing scholar who excavates Delphi or Crete, or the 
naturalist who explores New Guinea, whether he 
bring us a priceless statue or a passionate grotesque, 
has here a living experience to offer, and his pupils, 
nay, his pupils' pupils' pupils, may also vitally share 
in this. Few can repeat for themselves a Darwin's 
Voyage, or take part in a Challenger or a Cambridge 
Expedition ; yet every child in Cambridge can find 
strange monsters in the fen, every kindergarten mis- 
tress may find exploring grounds for her children in 
the nearest garden or park ; nay, what child does not 
instinctively long both for geologic observation and 
for engineering experience, for a free access and 
hand in the nearest gutter. What is essential, then, 
is not the mileage of the voyage, but the mental atti- 
tude of the explorer. Gilbert White found Nature 
in his garden; but the tourist, the globe-trotter, 
wears the same town-smoked spectacles wherever he 
goes. 

Hence, of course, a great factor in the prevalent re- 
action. If we are to submit to authority, let us select 
some authority better worth submitting to than " my 
Lords": let us return to the Church, the Pope, the 
Fathers, to Aristotle or Moses. If we are to memo- 
rise a catechism at all there may be as much educa- 
tive result in mastering that of the Westminster 
Assembly of Divines as all the cram-books in pub- 
lisherdom. This is a simple point enough; and may 
well seem not worth labouring; yet it is no mere 
fighting of extinct creeds. 

Where are there more slavish devotees than the 
candidates for London or Edinburgh examinations? 

184 



An Educational Approach 

Who ever more anxiously or unreflectively have 
believed in committing almost to memory the words 
of their text-book or master, and who have oftener 
told each other that they must assent to its or his 
particular theories or be "ploughed"? So chang- 
ing are the times that there seems nowadays to be 
more independent and speculative thinking among 
the aspirants to the Scottish ministry, once so strict, 
than among those of the university faculties of medi- 
cine, once and again so comparatively free : at any 
rate, since Robertson Smith, there has probably been 
less general ignorance of the results, and even of the 
methods of scientific research among the students of 
the older faculty than of the more modern one. 

The student of science no less than the teacher 
may thus look around him in the history and present 
of his own subject for that dry-rot with which he 
reproaches the theological world : he may next make 
a step towards the treatment of it. 

Take, for instance, that very science, which of all 
others should surely seem most difficult of desicca- 
tion and mistreatment, — the study of seed and bud 
and leaf, of flower and fruit, of the garment of earth 
in all its protean beauty. Yet what science may be 
made more repellent? and this alike to student and 
to child ; so that the very name of botany stinks in 
the nostrils of the public, and suggests a mere far- 
rago of dog-latin labels upon mouldering hay? Yet 
when we do not forget this in our winter haylofts, 
called herbaria, museums, laboratories, libraries, it is 
the goodly pageant of the seasons, the ever-returning 
drama of the floral year which has suggested alike 

1 85 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

the oldest nature poetry and the latest nature insight ; 
of this it is that Hesiod and Virgil, Linnaeus and 
Darwin have each opened a new page of exposition 
or interpretation. Yet as Virgil became "lines" and 
Linnaeus an artificial mnemonic, so now we have 
Darwin's great and luminous thought turned into an 
all-sufficient justification of every evil in life or deed. 
Even in recent instruction we have Darwin's foremost 
paladin, Professor Huxley, stereotyping as the " Ele- 
mentary Course of Biology," authoritative now for 
thirty years, not this teaching of his master, nor even 
the embryology of Von Baer or Spencer, but mainly 
a questionable reselection from the type-system of 
Cuvier, the obscurantist of evolutionism. In a word, 
then, this desiccation of science ever returns. But 
if so, the investigation of the educational fragility 
of our own science may usefully occupy us, in the 
intervals of the more pleasing task of throwing stones 
at the stained-glass houses of the theologians. 

Fixing and freezing forms, we, too, are losing sight 
of life and function, ere long worshipping idols; and 
so our scientific conviction of clarified dogma or 
body of " laws " all-sufficient for assured salvation 
from ignorance begins to give place to a poignant 
consciousness of shortcomings, inefficiency, and even 
error, with wrong action in consequence, which 
begins to give us some idea of what the preachers of 
our boyhood called the confession of backsliding 
and the conviction of sin. We begin to see that we 
have no less literally than symbolically made our 
museums of skeletons, our herbaria, our cabinets of 
fossils or of microscopic sections, into idols and bur- 

186 



An Educational Approach 

dens, which tend year by year to shut us out from 
the old openness to living nature, to weigh us down, 
in turn to fossilise into its past. 

But as during the study of letters there have ever 
been men, even generations, for whom the lexicon 
ceases to smother the literature and grammar poetry, 
and when these are seen again in their true place as 
helps, not substitutes and hindrances ; so after each 
wintry period of our science there comes a new tide 
of spring. Such a period is again beginning among 
us. Witness the freshening even of logical and 
mathematical study and teaching so long stereotyped 
after schoolman and Alexandrian ; witness the newer 
chemistry, or that marvellous modification of our 
physical theories which is now in progress ; witness 
new doctrines in medicine and in biology, yet more 
in psychology, as this rises beyond its strict bondage 
to brass instruments ; and latest, yet perhaps most 
vitalising of all, that profound renewal of social 
studies of which current popular discussions are but 
the advertisement and prologue. 

More than in the ponderous stiff-jointed university 
we see this transformation beginning in the school ; 
even among the dark places of the earth, like the 
public schools of England, we see here and there 
some bold and bright initiative — some Abbotsholme 
rising in its day and generation, as Rugby or Up- 
pingham or Loretto had arisen before, to emphasise 
its fresh outlook, and force its active example of this 
and that vitally needed improvement upon a sleepy 
and reluctant world. 

In the larger, freer, keener atmosphere of the 
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Ideals of Science and Faith 

American schools, such initiatives are less rare to 
seek. See Stanley Hall and his colleagues and dis- 
ciples with their child-study; Colonel Parker with his 
training of teachers ; Professor James with his " Talks 
to Teachers ; " Professor Dewey with his industrial 
recapitulations of race-experience. Fruitful examples 
of educational reawakening come to us also from the 
continent; not only from Jena or Paris, but from 
Madrid to Christiania. Since the days of Rousseau, 
of Pestalozzi and Frcebel the educational world has 
had no such general awakening; and this time it 
cannot leave out John Bull. 

While we are on this line of thought the case of 
the Frcebelians may be peculiarly instructive. For in 
a single half century we have seen this doctrine in its 
way through martyrdom to power, yet there too com- 
monly to fossilise into a slavish literalism of elemen- 
tary gifts, of doggerel rhymes; and these frozen into 
a wooden ritual, a shallow mysticism — at best an 
arrested phase of " Naturphilosophie," of the teach- 
ing of Oken — mechanically perpetuated by teachers 
who have often never heard of either the movement 
or the man. 

This bondage, no doubt, the superior minds of the 
kindergarten have largely or wholly escaped from; 
and even at its worst, it has doubtless been an im- 
provement upon what it replaced. Yet it is only 
with the current return of a direct and first-hand 
nature-study, a more genuine appreciation of produc- 
tivity in art, and a contact with the reality of handi- 
craft, that the Frcebelians as a body are escaping from 
the position of an estimable but somewhat supersti- 

188 



An Educational Approach 

tious sect, and are becoming reabsorbed with all that 
was vital in their master, into the rising current of 
general education. Thus they die to live more fully ; 
for what is the best university laboratory but a 
kindergarten of larger growth? 

We see, then, how it comes about that at this time 
everywhere the educationist is again looking around 
him, warned by the failure of each specialism and 
specialist; the failure still more of the sham syntheses 
which as " codes " and " programmes " increasingly 
imposed upon the past century. He must yet seek 
for some co-ordinating principle, some master-thought 
to guide his choice of subjects, his method in educa- 
tion. Where and how shall we seek this? Is not 
this being found in the common endeavour, more 
and more consciously beginning among the special 
workers of every sort, to escape from the preliminary 
static and analytic treatment of their subject to the 
kinetic one, the synthetic view? — to seethe stream 
as it moves, no longer content merely to map its 
plan, or measure its section as something assumed 
at rest? So while utilising, continuing, revising the 
whole analytic researches of the past, we have now 
also to unite and harmonise these towards an ever- 
growing synthesis — albeit one open to branch forth 
anew. The past of each scientific specialism has 
largely necessarily been occupied with the construc- 
tion of its instruments, and with the isolated manipu- 
lation of each. Now we begin to see again more and 
more clearly the possibility of orchestrating these; 
and thus create here and there the beginning of a 
school of educational art. Such schools are already 

189 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

beginning, each absorbing into itself all it needs from 
the present medley of specialisms, and so advancing 
consciously or unconsciously beyond the dominant 
German university principle, half true, half deficient 
in its unlimited but unco-ordinated and fragmentary 
specialisings — now popularised in this country at 
all levels, from " Tit-Bits " to its giant rival encyclo- 
paedia; for all three are alike the direct and literal 
descendants and representatives, for their respective 
sections of the public, of the " Grande Encyclop6die." 
In their logic and their science, for instance, such 
schools must transcend even the Hegelian, the Posi- 
tivist, or the Spencerian pro-synthesis, each too in- 
complete, too unrelated, too infertile in specialist 
advance, yet must succeed in uniting the essential 
qualities of all, and so in losing the characteristic 
defects of each. Of this true school, this renascent 
university of the opening future, we may find the 
fullest prototype in the great schools of early philo- 
sophy — Cortona, the Academy, the Lyceum; each 
seeking to see nature and life as a living whole, each 
meeting this in some characteristic way, each at once 
adapted to the times, and yet transcending them. 

Such an ideal of organised culture may and does 
indeed too often seem hopeless alike to the professed 
philosopher and to the man of science. But is not 
the latter too much absorbed by his immediate task 
of spinning or winding this one or that of the many- 
coloured and absolutely distinct warp-threads of 
analysis, to see it may be even the possibility, at any 
rate the actual place and power, of the flying shuttle 
of synthesis as it weaves the woof? The whole 

190 



An Educational Approach 

movement of modern specialism and division of 
labour is but this spinning, dyeing, fixing of warp- 
threads; while the complementary weaving process, 
always intermittent, and for the past generation too 
largely arrested, save for a philosopher or a live 
educationist here and there, is now being increas- 
ingly resumed, and will before long be again para- 
mount in the world. But for this the philosopher 
must no longer be content with throwing his shuttle 
in sublime metaphor or gesture merely, not even 
with sketching out on essay paper the pattern he 
would weave: he must now go forth among men to 
the concrete task of realising it, and this without 
missing or breaking a thread. 

After all, this movement only tends to complete 
upon a more educated level the familiar antithesis of 
the faddist and the man of the world. Intensively 
educate and encourage your faddist, and he becomes 
your eminent specialist; extensively educate and 
develop your man of the world in general interests 
and sympathies, and he becomes increasingly syn- 
thetic; or extend his experience in practical life and 
he becomes a statesman, at once reconciling and 
advancing the manifold interests of his working 
fellows. 

Given the preceding criticism of studies, and the 
advancing co-ordination of the school and university, 
progress may now be more systematically conceived 
— the preceding conception of the school being 
essentially applicable to the university, its various 
faculties and departments. The freedom of teaching 
and learning (" Lehrfreiheit und Lernfreiheit") won 

191 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

by German professor and student in the beginning of 
the nineteenth century, and since extending through- 
out the higher education of the world, has now widely 
to diffuse into secondary and primary education. 
Hence the liberation of the teacher; with a corre- 
sponding disappearance of external authority, in fact 
the resorption of government. And since " Lehrfrei- 
heit " involves " Lernfreiheit," the pupil also, in a 
degree commonly undreamed, must become respon- 
sible for the conduct of his personal education, as 
determined by the selection of his own ideals. For 
as honour is found to rise in proportion to responsi- 
bility, so intelligence also. It is the teacher with the 
most personal and spiritual freedom who most fully 
concedes this to his pupils — say, rather, evokes this. 

With this evolution of school as of university, with 
this disappearance of the mandarin enforcing memo- 
rising, reappears the ideal of the teacher proper, 
that of the thinker inducing thought, the musician 
music, the spirit spirit — Poeta poelagens. 

Are we, then, to define the pupil's own develop- 
ment? the student's? It is for him to form his own. 
The planted and watered seed must ever select for 
its own needs, and grow toward its own light; must 
blossom and fruit from within. 

By the application and development of such prin- 
ciples and methods, our ideal school of educational 
art is seen to be capable of definite design and 
material organisation. Yet no longer by any single 
authority, or even example, as there is no one ideal 
style of building, but as many as there are places and 
needs, materials and architects worthy of the occasion. 

192 



An Educational Approach 

Such schools have characterised every period of 
educational advance, and are again coming into evi- 
dence, and this in almost every country ; and each 
with its own characteristics, influence, and example. 
Even in apparently commonplace schools teachers of 
individuality are largely redeeming the situation ; while 
throughout the mass of tradition- or authority-ridden 
schools, and even among their externally most con- 
formist teachers, the aspiration towards freedom is 
rarely wholly extinct. 

Hence, at every level is needed the euthanasia of 
external and centralised authority, with the corre- 
sponding calling forth of the resources, aptitude, and 
insight of teachers and parents, and, most of all, of 
each school and group of children — as students and 
workers, as playmates and artists, learning and loving 
— in short, as more and more fully living. Vivendo 
discimus. 

The principles we have been pleading for thus 
hardly agree with the practice either of State schools 
or Church ones. Yet are they not being accepted by 
the one, and even claimed by the other? Each has 
now a full experience of what a dead dogmatic 
synthesis may be ; and each alike, at its best, claims 
to be seeking a more open and living one. Only to 
the mere Mandarin of State can the teacher's conse- 
quent claim of freedom seem an anarchist dream, as 
only to the withered bigot heresy. Epictetus and 
Antoninus, slave and emperor alike, knew that free- 
dom lay in the mind itself; and what more have we 
been trying to prove than that the "Kingdom of 
Heaven is within you"? What more to plead for 
13 J 93 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

than to " suffer the little children " ? For the ideal to 
which the child is dragged or driven is no ideal at all, 
but only its wooden image at best. 

The last of these educational propositions is the 
same on every level, each scientific man's insistence 
upon laboratory work in his subject being only his 
specialist way of proving that we must live the life if 
we would know the doctrine. 

The choice is thus no longer between " classical 
and modern sides " : these we see have too much 
been but rival death's-heads — there a post-mortem 
study of a literature, there the corresponding post- 
mortem of a science. Yet all these dry bases can 
live, are more than stirring; the current — say rather 
the incipient — improvement, both of humanist and 
of naturalist teachings, being at once a resurrection 
and a re-birth — the renascence of the Renaissance. 

Another process in the education of the man of 
science, as in the scientific growth of the education- 
alist, is indicated by his attitude to magic and romance. 
The fairy tales of science are often thus spoken of, 
and the science of fairy tales has long been an 
accredited branch of anthropology, but our meaning is 
more literal still. We are constantly being reminded, 
but are still too slowly learning, how much old magic 
and witchcraft was really skilful art, often founded 
upon subtler science than we lately knew: — who 
knows whether sometimes subtler than we have yet 
recovered? The illustration of the rise of hypnotism 
from a despised quackery to an accredited branch 
of psychologic science, of medicine, and even of 

194 



An Educational Approach 

educational and moral art, is a familiar case in point, 
but not the only one. The psychologist is constantly 
finding that he has himself more to learn as well as 
more to teach. It is easy, no doubt, for the experi- 
menter to reproduce its elementary process of hyp- 
notism by help of a glistening button or other simplest 
mechanical device; but when we learn that an 
ancestor of Charcot's in the fourteenth century was 
sufficiently eminent as a wizard to be burned with all 
due formalities, we feel more ready to admit the 
possibility of ascribing something to individual and 
hereditary aptitudes and powers. And I take it that 
many ordinary working-men of science, though like 
the writer without time or even inclination to take per- 
sonal part in psychological studies, have come to feel 
less sceptical of their usefulness, less contemptuous 
and intolerant towards even their boldest experimen- 
talists or speculators, than I am afraid we did twenty, 
or even ten years ago. We are at any rate more 
ready to believe there are still some things in heaven 
and earth not yet in our philosophy. That recent 
progress of physical research, of which Rontgen rays 
or radium ones are, after all, but the most salient and 
best popularised examples, not by any means the only 
ones, is widely operating, and must increasingly op- 
erate in the education of the man of science from his 
too common belief that the great generalisations of 
the permanence and definiteness of matter, and of the 
conservation and dissipation of energy had practically 
completed our notion of the physical constitution of 
the universe, and left only minor investigations to be 
pursued ; while it has justified in principle the specu- 

i95 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

lative thinking and teaching of profounder physicists, 
too long suspected of mere mystic or occultist dream- 
ing apart from science altogether. There is here, 
of course, no justification for the fears or hopes that 
the existing generalisations of science have been dis- 
credited, and that a period of mere alchemist-like 
speculations has returned. Yet the most advanced 
physicist and chemist is now once more reviewing 
the teaching of the old alchemists, as indeed Berthe- 
lot did not so long ago : and he may again probably 
interpret things which formerly seemed absurd or 
meaningless, again, perhaps, find suggestions toward 
renewed research. Something similar seems to be 
the case as regards biological science, as discoveries 
and speculations such as those of Pasteur or Brown- 
Sequard, of Roux or Metchnikoff, have shown. 

On every line of research we see science thus rising 
into art and art-magic. The breeder has long been 
at work, not only experimenting, but succeeding as 
the literal creator of new varieties, as every cattle 
show or flower-stall proves. The biologist begins to 
see yet further; at any rate he seeks not only to 
penetrate the secrets of heredity but to pierce below 
these to the deeper secrets of protean transformation. 
So he may yet understand some of those great lifts 
in the evolution of life which seem to have taken 
place in the past, perhaps — who knows — again 
experimentally produce such. But this is reviving 
the dream of the transmutation of Life, the fairy tale 
of Proteus, side by side with the search for the elixirs 
of its renewal. 

It is true that magic is not always favourably viewed 
196 



An Educational Approach 

by religion : some, indeed, contrast these sharply, and 
so far with truth. For while magic is increasing 
power over nature, religion sees rather the mystery 
of nature and shrinks from the boldness which unveils 
and takes her captive. Yet since our late master of 
scientific synthesis has given recognition in his system 
to the mystery of things as his Unknowable, and even 
his most convinced critics have more or less recog- 
nised that the indefinitely expanding sphere and sur- 
face of the Known must thereby come into wide and 
wider contact with the Unknown ; hence there is less 
ground for this criticism of science from the side of 
religion. The frank acceptance of every element of 
applied science as it appears is no longer seriously 
resisted in the name of religion. In this way one of 
the oldest quarrels in world-history seems approach- 
ing its conclusion; its rival thesis and antithesis 
beginning to establish a synthesis, and this an ex- 
panding one. 

Let us return, then, to the life-magic we were 
above discussing. In the recent GifTord lectures of 
Professor William James at Edinburgh, republished 
as his " Varieties of Religious Experience," he some- 
what fluttered the assembled medical and religious 
orthodoxy of Edinburgh by saying a word for the 
soul of goodness which appears to lie in faith-heal- 
ing, Christian Science, and other revivals of primitive 
Christianity, as of earlier and later magic and super- 
stition; and he further threw out the pregnant re- 
minder that many great religious uplifts of the past 
had been preceded by, and associated with, kindred 
developments of healing. By cleansing also ; witness 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

the marvellous detailed parallelism which may be 
drawn between the antiseptic rituals of Pasteur and 
Lister, still more of the latest aseptic surgeons, and 
the old-world purifications, Mosaic or Brahmin. 
Hence in the every-day education of the young 
Indian physician in our Edinburgh or London hos- 
pitals, there lies not only the immediate application 
of Western medical science to the lagging Orient, but 
a coming reinterpretation of Oriental symbolism 
and ritual, with, it may be, some fresh contribution 
from this recovered point of view to Western science. 
It may indeed be no small gain to the immediate 
future, both of sciences and religions, this rapid 
coming into maturity of such investigators of old 
races, yet therefore of new type. For they will com- 
bine the specialist scientific training and the practical 
energy of the Western world with that early famil- 
iarity, that matured and critical appreciation of the 
historic development of the East, which we Westerns 
lack even to meet its present needs, much more to 
renew its possibilities. 

A young Japanese critic, of whom we shall probably 
hear more, Mr. Okakura, in his recent " Ideals of the 
East " holds manifestly a thesis which, stripped of its 
characteristic national courtesy and reserve, may be 
expressed broadly to the following effect: You Medi- 
terranean and Baltic peoples, in your outlying penin- 
sula of Asia which you isolate as Europe, in the pride 
of your recent advances in knowledge and material 
civilisation, are still accustomed at times to recognise 
that the deepest and most general statement of ideals 
which you claim for one of yourselves, apart from the 



An Educational Approach 

religious developments you acknowledge to Asia, is 
that of the thinker who came nearest to us, alike in 
time and place and thought: it is Plato's philosophic 
revelation — the triad of good and beautiful and true. 
Now without undervaluing your own Greek or Chris- 
tian art — each eminent in its way — you have for the 
last generation been learning that it is in Japan that 
there has been longest and most generally, in many 
ways also most subtly and most deeply, the sense 
of Beauty. You begin to learn, too, that it is the 
Indian mind which longest, most generally, and most 
profoundly has pursued, like Plato himself, the inward 
search of Truth, and the contemplation of its light ; 
while you forget for the moment, though you have 
never historically denied, that it is yet another vast 
Eastern group of nations, which, woman-like, has 
specially sought the Good ; has best lived out the 
doctrine of her greatest teacher, with homely industry 
and practical insight threaded upon the golden rule. 
It is China, then, which has longest, most generally, 
and most fully raised the ideals of the artist and of 
the philosopher into that of the sage, with a resultant 
harmony of individual virtue and of social good ; 
which, despite elements of temporary arrest or deca- 
dence, and still more of disorder — caused largely by 
your ruthless interference — are still the longest 
continued and best diffused peace and prosperity, 
the completest " happiness of the greatest number" 
which the records of humanity have to show. To 
the school of China, therefore, go also, as to that of 
India and of Japan ; and when you appreciate her 
world-preeminent recognition and realisation of the 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

Good, you may then also help each of us to complete 
our Triad, to renew and add to each of its elements. 

So far, then, the half-latent thesis of this new sociolo- 
gist; which must come with some arousing freshness 
to a generation whose mental images of the East have 
been too much compounded from the crude present- 
ments of trader and raider, of missionary, military, 
or official expansionist, of revengeful war-lord or 
brazen minstrel, each in some varying combination 
of what he himself appears to the Oriental — " half 
devil and half child." After all it is but a restatement 
of the old saying, " Ex Oriente Lux ; " but with its 
call to a widening of our respect and sympathy it 
indicates one of the most notable ways in which the 
scientific man and the religious may anew resume 
and advance their anthropological and historical 
education, and with this their recovery of philosophic 
and moral ideals. 

We are ever told that the East is now but the 
sepulchre of its noble past, and we set our legiona- 
ries to watch it as they may ; yet who shall say its 
buried ideal cannot arise, may not even now have 
arisen? The dream, the resolve of Eastern pilgrim- 
age thus in very deed returns ; nor can we fail of 
reconciling both aims, the religious and the scien- 
tific, nor these again with Education, in thus seeking 
the truth in love ; in thus discerning that the meshes 
of the net of Peter were the parallels and the meridi- 
ans of a wider world-sweep than we knew. 

Wherever man wins power over nature, there is 
Magic ; so, wherever he carries out an ideal into life, 

200 



An Educational Approach 

there is Romance. In the common reactionary criti- 
cism of the spread of public libraries, laments over 
the reading of novels is a stock element. But even 
from the side of natural and healthy recreation, 
what better can people do than utilise the principal 
art-form of their age ; from the side of moral edu- 
cation, what could be more desirable than the power 
of now wholly forgetting our own personal self and 
cares in one's interest in another's ; or again of see- 
ing one's own life and ideals, personal or social, in 
those of others? But no: he should read the mar- 
vels of chemistry, the triumphs and possibilities of 
engineering ; and above all things become acquainted 
with those dazzling revelations of recent economic 
science — a science once dismal in working garments, 
but nowadays scarlet and brazen with military 
metaphon For thus he may prepare to play his 
patriotic part in the approaching, ever-victorious 
TarifYades by which megalopolitan wealth and im- 
perial greatness are to be assured, and by means 
of which all our enemies, retaliation duly adminis- 
tered, will thereafter submissively live and labour 
under our footstool. 

Yet if the life be more than meat and the body 
than raiment, so the eye is more than all these new 
radiances; even Quantity of Empire to-day may be 
less than Quality of Race to-morrow. Here then is 
the vital point of opening science, practical as well 
as speculative. It is easy to sneer at Mary Jane and 
her " Family Herald," with their simple tales of 
Edwin and Angelina; but like the earliest romance 
and fairy tale, these contain not only deeper essen- 

201 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

tial facts of life, but greater and more urgent prob- 
lems of practical policy than have ever been fairly 
realised by any modern political party. 

Squire and manufacturer have had their day of 
political prominence; and proconsul and promoter 
are now having theirs. But are these not bringing 
out even more fully than did their predecessors that 
the fundamental questions are beyond them also, — 
that these are not territorial and administrative, not 
military, not financial and fiscal, any more than they 
were merely manufacturing or mercantile; but that 
they are organic upon one side, racial upon another; 
and evolutionary or degenerative upon each and all. 

Leaving, then, the pleas of art and recreation, we 
must ask what, in the name of progressive science, 
biological and sociological alike, is at this moment 
more needed than the general practical acceptance 
and scientific development of this standpoint of the 
novel-reader? Especially is this needed among the 
great classes indicated above, who take themselves so 
seriously, yet who, if truth be told, live far more in a 
dream-world than ever did or can Mary Jane. That 
the novelist may see nearer the facts of life than the 
politician is not denied, since it was flashed upon the 
world by Zola. But this was indeed not once only, 
but many times, and by many men more than he. 
Familiar recent examples also may be found in the 
evolution of writers of our own, like Mr. Wells and 
Mr. Bernard Shaw, from their former very different 
thought-worlds, to the popularisation and advance 
of current biological enquiry, and its application to 
the problems of human race and breed. 

202 



An Educational Approach 

Here, then, new and strange partnerships are open- 
ing ; as of romancist and of dramatist with statistician 
and insurance actuary ; each and all preparing to go 
into practical politics: and whatever conventional 
Conservative or Liberal, Labour or Irish member 
may fail to think or say, it is for them either to fit 
themselves to face such new post-fiscal questions and 
all they bring with them, or to give way to succes- 
sors who can. 

The organic aspects of this matter are for the 
biologist ; but the psychological and the ethical 
have always been claimed and as yet mainly treated 
by the Church ; so, following upon the heels of 
satirists or statisticians and to the support of Wells 
and Shaw, of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, will 
soon be coming not only naturalists of all specialisms 
from one side, but clergy of all denominations from 
the other. 

Even the approach of these unwonted allies will be 
largely a common one, and this at all levels — alike 
beginning with the protest against that physical 
degeneration, of which we now begin so clearly to 
know the cause and the cure, in respective adapta- 
tion to environment of slum or garden, so that our 
cities are to scatter and to build anew. In this trans- 
formation, then, at once material and moral, biologist 
and parson will soon practically be working together, 
without even the time to compare notes as to their 
speculative differences. 

But beyond this a further co-operation begins to 
come into view. The biologist begins for the first 
time to understand the cleric — to discern what he 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

stands for in the world. In the development of 
human life there is no mere gentle daily change: 
there are also great transformations and crises. 
Birth, childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity, mar- 
riage, parenthood, age, and death are not merely or- 
ganic phases, but psychic phases also ; and each with 
their normal and pathological aspects, their evolu- 
tionary and degenerative possibilities. 

This being so, as the biologist and sociologist begin 
to confer on human breed, they must awake to a new 
interest even in the anthropomorphic ideals of reli- 
gions, pagan or Christian, and this in unexpected 
completeness of details. For what are the gods of 
Hellas but thought-sculptures of each phase of human 
life at its fairest? And what better could the most 
anti-theological evolutionist desire for human well- 
being than some renewal for modern maidenhood of 
her old-world Messianic hope? 

The biologist has been long enough anatomising 
the individual at every period of his development; 
but his science is more than a vast post-mortem ex- 
amination of man and nature. He claims to have 
learned, to be learning, more of the secrets of evolu- 
tion than the older arts of medicine, education, of 
temporal and spiritual government and guidance 
have yet possessed. But to take part in their re- 
newal to which he begins to aspire he must himself 
comprehend their general purpose, indeed increas- 
ingly share their point of view. 

Long indeed he has been accompanying the phy- 
sician in his attendance upon practically every phase 
of human development from birth to death; and now 

204 



An Educational Approach 

with the hygienist, both are becoming awake to all 
the normal ones. Since all are learning that mind 
and body are more intimately related than we knew, 
they join company with the mental physician in 
his studies of defective and morbid minds, and 
with the educationist in his labours for intellectual 
development. 

So far, however, to the scientific worker, the priest 
of every denomination seems at least as unrelated to 
this movement as he can seem to theirs. Yet are we 
not now ready for a mutual understanding? Recent 
studies, like those of psychologists and anthropolo- 
gists upon the moral and religious development of 
the individual, are preparing him for a fresh under- 
standing of the clerical profession, as that which 
seeks (successfully or unsuccessfully is not here the 
question) to aid and guide these developments of 
the human spirit, for a consideration of which the 
comparative study of religion, and the biographic 
analysis of individual experience, are now preparing 
him. 

Here, then, once more the scientific educationist 
begins to find himself in unexpected general under- 
standing with parson and priest. For he cannot 
exclude his growing conception of an evolutionist 
art, which shall increasingly aid and regulate human 
life. The Socratic ideal of the " birth-helper," the 
Christian ideal of the Good Shepherd, must thus re- 
appear in our scientific and practical evolutionism. 
Our opening line of advance plainly shows that those 
who continue it will be those who recapitulate and 
continue as fully as they may the personal evolution 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

of those who have already so mightily laboured for 
the psychic lift of the individual and of the race. 
With both Hellenist and Hebraist, therefore, our 
modern spiral of evolution is again bringing us into 
unexpected parallelisms — parallelisms romantic in 
more than their revivals of the past, parallelisms 
magical not only in their insight into the present, but 
their prevision, their control of the opening future. 

Enough, then, of these parallelisms between the 
new ideals of education pleaded for on modern evo- 
lutionary grounds, and these old ideals commonly 
defended for more ancient reasons. There is little 
danger that any will exaggerate their importance for 
immediate practical purposes; or expect the evolu- 
tionary naturalist to enroll himself under the banner 
of some historic ecclesiasticism any more than the 
modern ecclesiastic hastily to transform church into 
laboratory. 

But it is something if as scientific men we come to 
see in general education, as in each and every special 
science, that Idea and Form must be harmonised into 
living Art. Failing this, as another essay in this vol- 
ume points out, they must freeze into Ceremonialism 
as dead as any against which we or our predecessors 
have protested in Church or in State. And further, 
as science rises into art, and thus not only specialism 
into practice, but realism into idealism, this scientific 
idealism gives us a new understanding and sympathy 
with the past and present idealism of older schools, 
discerning beneath what may have seemed but dead 
ceremonial an ever renascent Symbolism. 

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An Educational Approach 

Men of science and men of religion, it is true, are 
far from reconciled. Let them discuss, therefore, 
frankly and fully ; but above all let each keep mov- 
ing. The problems at issue can seldom be really 
touched by the self-sufficiency of either the mere 
logical debater or of the practical man of either 
party: they need sympathy, insight, and interpreta- 
tion from the beginning. This realised, the ideal 
revelations of the past, even their social creations 
also, no less than the phases of arts and sciences, may 
again be interpreted in the present, and their vital 
elements transmitted to the future. 



II 

The Approach through Technical Education 

Lastly a word of technical education and the ap- 
proaches it may present to the ideals we are seek- 
ing. Yesterday in town I met an old friend, who 
tells me his son is soon leaving school with classical 
honours, to win scholarships and glory in like manner 
at Oxbridge. There in due course he will become 
a don, and perhaps cultivate the muses with the 
best; at any rate he can always become an athlete 
or a library lounger, or an examiner, or coach, or 
common-room gossip, with the larger mediocrity. 
Or the boy himself may have views ; he can at any 
rate become a high mandarin, say in the education 
office or the Indian civil or colonial service. 

" And how is your boy, and what is he doing, since 
he is not at school?" I am asked in turn. "He 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

does some lessons at home; and he is learning to 
be a pretty fair gardener." " Ah ! and will that be 
enough for him by and by ? " " Oh, no, not quite ! " 
said I; "when I left him he was making a box." 
" Ah ! " said my friend again, and dropped the con- 
versation, evidently thinking nothing could be made 
of my surly and paradoxical impracticability. 

Yet, to my mind, there are indeed two main pieces 
of work in a boy's education ; and one of these is to 
garden, and the other is to make boxes. When our 
boys can do these, and not till then, they 'have got 
their essential education for their work in the world : 
for as all labour, all occupations and professions may 
be broadly classed as of one type or the other, as 
either rustic or urban, youths preparing to enter the 
directive classes may well have some experience of 
both. If not constructive work of some kind in the 
country, then constructive work of some sort, direct 
or indirect in the town, is, let us hope, their destiny : 
the world is beginning to show symptoms of being 
a little less tolerant of the amusers, the talkers, and 
other foremost percentagers upon the passing order. 
Each does best what he enjoys, and he enjoys best 
what he has done long, what he did as a child ; 
hence this impulse toward constructive work in child- 
hood ; and hence there is a growing minority of edu- 
cationists who think that this — not the three R's, 
though we may henceforth take these for granted — 
may be the most vital endowment with which our 
young folks can face the world. One cannot always 
fully predict whether a lad's future fortune and work 
will lie in town or country; but for health and 

208 



An Educational Approach 

culture both in due proportion are desirable; even 
in these simple ways a boy may be more seriously 
preparing for the coming life-work and life-battle 
than to the conventional may at first sight appear. 

The joy of making something with one's hands is 
much the same for the simple box-maker as for the 
finer cabinet-maker; and for both as for the artist; 
the " good job," which expresses the pleasure alike 
of maker and user, being for ordinary purposes as far 
as we need get in the definition of Art. 

To get the true hand, the true eye, one must get 
them early. The great masters of the Renaissance, 
the smaller artists of to-day, how do they differ? 
Very largely in that the master began his apprentice- 
ship as a boy of twelve or fourteen at most, while 
the hand and brain centres were still fully adaptable ; 
while we make our contemporaries wait to begin 
their artistic education until late adolescence or even 
manhood ; that is, until it is physiologically too late 
to make high skill an organic and subconscious func- 
tioning of brain and hand. When by exception, with 
much industry, they still reach a fair standard, this 
tends to fall off at middle age, instead of continuing 
and developing throughout the utmost length of life, 
like Hokusai or Leonardo or Titian. Of course 
high skill may never be attained even by our boy- 
workman, yet has he not a timely and needed school- 
ing in resourcefulness and common sense, which are 
surely not among the least important qualifications 
in the world? Box-making develops this as books 
can never do. 

Another great advantage about box-making, be- 
14 209 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

sides in these simple ways helping the young worker 
to become " one whose hands have made him wise," 
is the deeper, the truly moral education of it. This 
is immediate and direct, from the clean fit and the 
straight-planed surface, and the true right-angle, 
small and simple ethical elements perhaps, yet enough 
for the freemason to have developed almost into a 
religion. But there is also the larger social outlook. 
I do not here refer to organisation of labour, co- 
operation, guildry, or the like — I know not how far 
these are as yet adaptable in education at all ; but 
I would insist upon the simpler immediate sense of 
social usefulness, with which a youngster makes or 
shelves his box, to be thereafter useful as bookcase 
or what-not to some other member of the household, 
or given away to some remoter purpose. As yet 
such simple labour has not been made either con- 
structively attractive or socially and morally attrac- 
tive to the mass either of your working or directing 
community: they have missed both its artistic and 
its social pleasures, and thus it is their work is done 
for pay; and in adult life the pay comes alone, or 
almost alone, to matter, whereas with the boy's box, 
it is obvious that its make and its use, its artistic fin- 
ish and its social application are the essential points ; 
while as to payment or reward this comes only in the 
form of more wood and tools, and in the encourage- 
ment to make more boxes and still better ones. 

Some educationists favour payment for school or 
home work as a means of introduction to the finan- 
cial order of things, which the children of course 
must meet; but is not the important thing rather 

210 



An Educational Approach 

to postpone this, at any rate until both the artistic 
and social pleasures have become instinctive, habitual, 
organic, through the habit and experience of years? 

Here, in passing, a concrete point of domestic 
detail may be mentioned as quite worthy the atten- 
tion of home educators, and it may be of school 
ones; certainly of scientific and moral ones, here 
specially in view. There are few houses but can do 
with more shelving, more cupboards and bookcases. 
These cost money, so one puts off getting them : 
meantime books accumulate in disorder, papers go 
astray, and so on. To buy from one's grocer his 
egg or soap boxes, and to shelve these by cutting 
up their lids, is to furnish not only an elementary 
workshop exercise, but a useful article of furniture, 
and furthermore a lesson in order to boot, which 
is none the less of scientific value because a practical 
one. The boxes of course can be shelved in various 
proportions, with two, three, or four divisions; and 
when finished, can be used as units, built up into 
various forms, and screwed together to fit all sorts of 
places, from the smallest nook or garret space to 
erections against the largest wall — in fact a bookcase 
proper. Staining or paint is of course applied with 
advantage; leather binding can be added along the 
shelves with clean and neat result: a moulding can 
be run round the top or base, and a vase or bust put 
on top. This, in short, with an expenditure of a 
couple of shillings for a dozen boxes, with a trifle for 
nails, stain, and varnish, and a very moderate expen- 
diture of time and pains, enables a boy to produce a 
piece of furniture just as serviceable as things for 

211 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

which we may have paid pounds, and in its plain 
way it may be even a good deal more seemly. 

That our boy should make his own bookcases, 
as well as some for other people, might next be 
followed into educational issues, like that of the vast 
importance of the beginning of good book-collections 
sufficiently early in life. Does not your great biblio- 
phile, your librarian, go back to his childish book- 
case as his real start in life, just as the naturalist 
to his first collection of stones or shells, the artist 
to his first drawing-book with its soldiers and horses, 
its moo-cows and puff-puffs? Moreover, it is too 
seldom remembered that the great lesson of " a place 
for everything, and everything in its place " can only 
be taught when the place is provided; and this 
means shelves and pigeonholes, boxes and drawers, 
far beyond the ordinary resources of a child, even in 
roomier homes than most. Here, then, is a bit of 
technical education worth more than the more pre- 
tentious customary ones. 

Coming now to garden work and its value, much 
might be said. But those who know its lessons do 
not need to be told them; those who do not must 
first learn by experience. Such work over and 
above lessons leaves too little time for play? Some- 
times that is quite true: save for a brief romp be- 
tween lessons at mid-day, before or after work in the 
afternoon, there is sometimes no long play time at 
all in the day. Yet is not the work play while the 
worker is enjoying it? and even if sometimes it feels 
a little hard, is there not a time for everything? and 
so even now and then to work on all day without 

212 



An Educational Approach 

play? Is not that also one of the experiences and 
needed powers of maturer life? one therefore which 
it may be well to learn when young? There is a 
time for everything, and a time there must be — an 
ample time — assuredly, for play. Throw box and 
spade alike aside; romp, and chase; and hide out 
of doors; to dance and play, to sing and act within; 
give plenty of time to each. Now they are contriv- 
ing and stage-carpentering a play; now utilising all 
the garden hiding-places ; and here is for our young 
folks an entering into the fruit of their labours, a 
devising of new ones also. To encourage each of 
these amusements to be carried out to the full, 
even at the expense of lessons and of work alike, 
is the surest way to send them back to work with 
a new zest. In such genial and natural alternation 
of work and play is the true, that is the natural, the 
psychological, time-table ; and the experience of our 
little home school regularly proves it is one which 
in practice is adaptable enough with reasonable 
regularity also. 

To work constructively, artistically, and sociably, 
and this in both the rustic and urban world by turns, 
as circumstances and needs, season and weather, 
mood or opportunity may settle, for four or even 
five afternoons in the week, to play and romp or 
ramble for at least one whole afternoon, to make 
music and dance at least one evening, all this with 
the morning routine of lessons, together with per- 
sonal reading, and the ordinary claims of home life, 
make up a busy enough week. 

What is wanting for the Sunday? Complete free- 
213 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

dom from ordinary lessons and labour being of course 
assumed, may we not touch the much discussed sub- 
ject of moral and religious education by help of 
the most vividly didactic elements of the whole 
Hebrew literature, the Proverbs and the Parables? 
For what are the Proverbs? What but the homely 
yet poetic wisdom of the rustic and urban labour, 
of the every-day domestic economy of the people, 
yet also of their result in national economy and 
statesmanship, in personal and national destiny. 
What are the Parables if not primarily subtler and 
more spiritualised interpretations of the same homely 
experience, drawn from the same every-day familiar- 
ity with simple and educative toil? 

When in the autumn holiday there comes the 
chance of helping with the stooks, the verse, " He 
that sleepeth in harvest is a son that causeth shame," 
may be a lifelong lesson ; while " Wisdom hath 
builded her house " will have a new meaning for 
the youngsters who have built so much as a summer- 
house in a corner of the garden, or a Robinson hut 
under a tree. Though the Proverbs have long been 
fathered upon the traditionally wisest of kings, we 
note that he never speaks of learning his wisdom, 
like other kings, from hunting or its normal develop- 
ment of war, but from planting and building. And 
is it not worthy of note that our true British Solo- 
mon — not the crowned one ironically so called, but 
him of the advancement of learning — was, as his 
essays show, one of the master-builders and planters 
of his own or any day. 

It may be said that Solomon's or even Bacon's 
214 



An Educational Approach 

building and planting was upon a very grandiose 
scale ; but this really matters little : in both cases 
theirs was the husbandman's lore, the peasant's wis- 
dom, and the Egyptians and the Chaldeans them- 
selves had no more. Let our youngster tug out the 
coarsest weeds, or weary himself carrying water for 
his little garden ; he is ready for the ethic of Zoroaster 
in its high idealism, yet constructive intensity — an 
agricultural wisdom if ever there was one. It is only 
after reclaiming the tiniest bit of waste as garden 
that he is really ready for the greatest of all lessons 
in the world's geography : that which fills the pupil's 
imagination from the teacher's own with the mighti- 
est of human tasks ; that of the coming combination 
under geographer and moralist of statesman, finan- 
cier, engineer, labourer, forester, peasant, gardener, 
architect, and singer, which will yet regenerate whole 
climates and populations; not only those of the 
Mediterranean, from Spain to Syria, but from the 
Sahara to the Gobi desert. 

That the Sahara is actually beginning to be re- 
claimed, to be here a eucalyptus forest and there 
a vineyard, its sands increasingly jewelled with in- 
numerable date-oases, which spring like fairyland 
from each new artesian well ; and that the same 
constructive progress has yet to pass through Arabia 
and Persia into Central Asia and thence into China 
far beyond — these are lessons for which your boy- 
gardener is prepared, — and your boy-gardener alone, 
as boys are educated at present. 

Since many think little of small tasks, let them 
note that this vast world Eutopia, this reconstruc- 
ts 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

tion of the ruined East, this mastery of nature, is 
something impossible to kings or conquerors, but 
will need the personal toil and co-operation of moral- 
ised millions through generations and centuries yet 
to come. And the only way of preparing these, of 
disciplining these industrial armies, for this greatest 
imaginable planetary result, will be to begin with the 
small tasks within the child's means and strength. 

Returning to the question of technical and ethical 
schooling upon a more familiar plane, do we not see 
in most of these Parables the very essence of homely 
experience, of rustic wisdom; and in that of the 
house foundations, the reflective experience of the 
urban craftsman as well? That the carpenter of 
Nazareth had shared both rustic and urban labour 
as a boy is surely plain. In the education of practi- 
cal life, then, as in that of thought, our modern sec- 
tion of the long spiral evolution sweeps strangely 
parallel to that of the past, asunder though these 
segment-curves may seem. 

PATRICK GEDDES. 



216 



APPROACHES THROUGH FAITH 



A PRESBYTERIAN APPROACH 

The Rev. JOHN KELMAN, M.A. 
Author of " The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson" etc. 

NO fact is more familiar to the student of history 
than the long rivalry and conflict between sci- 
ence and religion. Yet it is not, prima facie, apparent 
either that this is a necessary or that it will be a 
permanent state of matters. On the contrary, one is 
impressed by the great number of interests, methods, 
and ideals which they have in common. Each of 
them aims at the discovery, the unification, and the 
orderly presentation of human knowledge. Each 
ultimately rests on faith, inasmuch as each is forced 
back upon convictions which are beyond the possi- 
bility of further analysis or proof. Every one asserts 
this of religion, but it is not always remembered that 
it is equally true of science. The reality of an ex- 
ternal world, the connection of cause and effect, the 
reliability of the enquirer's powers of observation and 
reasoning, are fundamental elements in knowledge of 
the same kind as the ultimate data of religion. Even 
the methods of their advance are common to the two, 
for although the deductive method is usually associ- 
ated with religion, it is often used by science ; and all 
living religious faith is continually verifying and cor- 
recting its beliefs by experience, using just those 

219 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

methods of hypothesis and experiment which in- 
ductive science uses. Many ideals also — ideals of 
civilisation, culture, and philanthropy — they hold 
in common, where either is properly understood. 

Their characteristic mood or spirit is the same. 1 
It is sometimes imagined that the scientific spirit is 
proud and masterful, while the religious spirit is one 
of humility and submission. It might with equal truth 
be affirmed that science, discovering law, has for 
its characteristic word obedience, and that religion 
teaches men to regard themselves as kings unto God. 
The scientific spirit has been finely described as that 
of " absolute temper, patience, and gentleness neces- 
sary in order to obtain fine results," but these are 
the very qualities in which religion recognises the 
fruits of the Spirit. Both religion and science have 
transgressed their own rules and suffered for their 
transgression. If religion has dogmatised beyond 
knowledge in her impatience to complete her sys- 
tems, has not science also, in such imaginations as 
the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life, " at- 
tempted to reach a great law at once, leaping for 
the top of the ladder " ? If credulity still hampers 
science by the hasty acceptance or arbitrary rejec- 
tion of new theories, can any system of religion as 
yet boast that it has quite freed itself from a like 
credulity? 

Yet there are many persons who suppose that the 
two are essentially antagonistic; that the war be- 

1 For many points in this paragraph the writer gladly acknowl- 
edges his indebtedness to a most luminous and suggestive address 
delivered by Miss Maynard of Westfield College. 

220 






A Presbyterian Approach 

tween them is without quarter and to the death. Mr. 
Mallock asserts that " the quarrel between Science 
and Religion is direct and open," and there are many 
who share his opinion. It must indeed be acknowl- 
edged that there is much in the history of the past 
to confirm such a statement. Century after century 
each new discoverer was looked upon as a kind of 
infernal counterpart of Prometheus, stealing the 
nether fires for the use of mortals ; and the Church 
anticipated with its tortures the vulture of Jove. On 
the other hand, science has often been irrationally 
and even violently anti-religious. In our own time, to 
quote but one instance of the breach, sociology has 
sometimes despised the philanthropic efforts of the 
Church, and the Church has ignored and even con- 
demned the work of sociology. The loss has been 
mutual. Science, losing reverence, has often fallen 
into the vulgarity of a wholly material utilitarianism ; 
religion, losing usefulness and touch with actual life, 
has gone a-dreaming. 

But the time has come when signs may be seen of 
a rapprochement such as has never been witnessed in 
the past. It is now forty years since Dr. Martineau 
wrote : " Science discloses the method of the world, 
but not its cause : Religion its cause, but not its 
method ; and there is no conflict between them ex- 
cept when either forgets its ignorance of what the 
other alone can know." During the years since 
these words were written there has been an increas- 
ing recognition of their truth by the most intelligent 
men on both sides. It is interesting and instructive 
to lay alongside each other the following two utter- 

221 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

ances, published in the present year by professors 
of Edinburgh University, than whom no fairer or 
more competent judges could be quoted. Dr. Flint, 
emeritus Professor of Divinity, writes of " that long 
and deplorable war between superstition and reason 
which is so often most erroneously represented as 
the conflict of religion and science, and in which 
every seeming victory of the former was necessarily 
a real defeat." Dr. Chiene, Professor of Surgery, 
writes : " There can be no antagonism between true 
science and true religion : they clash only when they 
are false. Their present antagonism is only another 
word for our ignorance." 

We may, indeed, go further than the denial of their 
antagonism, and the advocacy of their mutual toler- 
ance and appreciation and their alliance in the pur- 
suit of common ideals. All truth is one, and science 
and religion are at one in the deeper sense of being 
but different aspects of that same search for truth 
which all wise and good men accept as a main part 
of their destined task in life. Believing this to be 
the case, our aim in the present chapter will be to 
trace in rough and fragmentary outline the general 
course of the relations between science and religion 
in the Presbyterian Church, in order that we may 
discover the causes of their former misunderstanding 
and the lines along which we may hope to see them 
now approach and co-operate. That the field of our 
enquiry may be at once representative and at the 
same time sufficiently small and manageable, we may 
be permitted to confine our attention to the history 
of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. 

222 



A Presbyterian Approach 

It may be added that it is no part of the writer's 
aim to advocate the claims of Presbyterianism against 
those of any of the other Churches of Christendom. 
Each Church has its own special advantages and 
disadvantages in regard to this question, but these 
do not concern our present purpose. Consequently 
we shall not stay to count heads, or to attempt any 
list of Presbyterians living or dead who might be 
cited as eminent scientists. Every reader who has 
even a slight knowledge of the subject will be able 
to recall a number of names very fully sufficient to 
justify the claim of the Presbyterian Church to a 
voice in the discussion. In further support of that 
claim it may be permissible to remind the reader 
that this Church has from the first given special 
attention to the education of its ministry, insisting 
upon a course varying from six to eight years in 
the study of Arts and Divinity for every student. 
A further consideration which may render the 
study of this section of Church History useful to 
the general discussion is that in the main its out- 
ward conditions have been rather moderate than 
extreme. 

Behind John Calvin, the founder of Presbyterian- 
ism, there lay much that is of primary significance 
for our enquiry. It is true that " in mediaeval times 
physical science was neglected, and the physical 
world itself viewed as a degraded and disorderly 
thing." Yet even the Scholastic Theology of the 
so-called " Dark Ages " had done much for science. 
That conception of unity which is the essential ele- 
ment in science is largely a gift to her from the 

223 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

mediaeval Church. Prof. T. M. Lindsay, one of the 
greatest living Presbyterian authorities on Church 
History, points out that the science of the pagan 
world was never on a par with its philosophical 
speculations, and he goes on to say: "The truth 
seems to be that science requires to build on a foun- 
dation supplied by Christianity, and which paganism 
is unable to furnish, or at least has never yet fur- 
nished. Science presupposes and rests on the idea 
of the oneness and uniformity of the universe, and 
this idea is, strictly speaking, a Christian conception. 
Aristotle, the most scientific of the ancients, was 
unable to conceive the uniformity of nature, or the 
totality of things, in anything like the sense which 
these phrases have to modern thinkers. . . . Chris- 
tianity did not propose to itself the solution or even 
the statement of scientific problems, but its yearning 
to get near God enabled it to see deeper into the 
problem of the basis of science than the whole of 
pagan thought had been able to do. The Christian 
doctrine of creation and the Christian doctrine of 
providence furnish the foundations on which modern 
science rests." These doctrines, affirming the abso- 
lute dependence of all things upon God both for 
their origin and in their endurance, " gave that basis 
for the thought of the uniformity of nature which 
science demands. ,, 

The Renaissance and the Reformation added new 
forces and afforded new scope for the great truth 
which mediaeval Christianity had " kneaded into 
human thought." Physical science addressed itself 
to the task of working out the principle of unity 

224 



A Presbyterian Approach 

in connection with its successive discoveries. But 
apart from all specific problems, the intellectual curi- 
osity of man was awakened, and along with it the 
demand for liberty of thought. 

In tracing, so far as our limits will permit, the 
relations of science and religion in the history of 
Presbyterianism, it will be seen that there has been 
much alienation. Yet no page of history more 
clearly reveals the fact that that alienation was not 
due to anything inherent either in religion or in 
science, but to mistaken conceptions of them enter- 
tained by those who represented them, and to ad- 
ventitious causes arising from the circumstances of 
the times. And it will be possible to show with 
equal clearness that beneath the alienation there 
always lay a deeper unity whose full significance and 
effect are only now becoming manifest. 

John Calvin (i 509-1 564) does not appear at first 
sight to have made much contribution to our sub- 
ject. He was a jurist rather than a scientist, and his 
youth seems to have been wholly occupied with legal 
studies. His conflict with Servetus, a Spanish phy- 
sician of the mystical school of the time, has been 
quoted as a notable instance of the war between 
science and religion, and indeed Servetus himself 
taunted Calvin in Geneva with his want of scientific 
knowledge. His condemnation of the heretic, judged 
by whatever standards and seen under whatever 
light, of course remains an act directly opposed to 
the scientific spirit. The time was as yet far distant 
when the right of private judgment could be fully 
recognised or even rightly understood. 
15 22 5 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

It must also be remembered that the age of Calvin, 
and indeed the period after his death for four gener- 
ations, were such as to concentrate the interest of 
churchmen rather on questions of government than 
on theories of knowledge. Government, like all 
other organisation and machinery, is most in evi- 
dence when it is least perfect. During the seven- 
teenth century the British Constitution was finding 
itself and settling some of its fundamental principles 
in Church and State. During the sixteenth century, 
in Calvin's time, the churches of the Reformation 
were finding and settling theirs. Thus it came to 
pass that, whatever might have been their aptitudes 
and their tastes, ecclesiastical leaders then had no 
course open to them except attention to the burning 
and immediate questions of government. Calvin's 
great work was his Institutes^ a book of Systematic 
Theology and of Church Government conceived and 
executed on a colossal scale. 

Yet though Calvin's work does not bear directly 
upon scientific problems, there is that in it which 
gives it a place of first importance and significance 
in our present study. " Luther had created, it was 
left for Calvin to fashion," as the contrast between 
the two men has been aptly expressed. Calvin found 
the ideas and forces of the Reformation scattered ; 
he bent his strength to give them unity; and the 
result was what has been called by one of the ablest 
of his critics, " a majestic and comprehensive sys- 
tem." His watchword was order, the very master- 
principle of science. It is this fact which Rudyard 
Kipling grasps and so forcibly expresses in his 

226 



A Presbyterian Approach 

11 McAndrew's Hymn," where the Scotch engineer 
sings of his engines : — 

"Now a'together, hear them lift their lesson — theirs an' mine 
Law, Order, Duty an' Restraint, Obedience, Discipline. . . 
From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy Hand, O God — 
Predestination in the stride o' yon connectin'-rod. 
John Calvin might ha' forged the same — enormous, certain, 

slow — 
Ay wrought it in the furnace-flame — my Institutio." 

Opinions will always differ as to the truth or error 
of the Calvinistic system, but no fair critic will refuse 
to admit that it was one of those tremendous attempts 
at the unification of knowledge which can only be 
ranked among the greatest, along with such others as 
Spinoza's, Hegel's, and Herbert Spencer's. 

John Knox, Calvin's contemporary and greatest 
pupil, was a man of wider interests than his master. 
The juridical bent of Calvin's mind found the work 
he had to do suitable and congenial; Knox might 
well have found a lifework which he would have pre- 
ferred to the task of establishing Presbyterianism in 
Scotland. What he might have done in the field of 
science we shall never know. Not very much, per- 
haps, for the scientific awakening in Great Britain 
was slow to come, and even Lord Bacon ( whose 
Novum Organum was published half a century after 
Knox's death) was before his time in England. At 
all events the fact remains that Knox, like Calvin, 
had his thoughts and energies diverted from other 
pursuits by the exigencies of Church Government in 
his times. 

The seventeenth century witnessed a great revival 
227 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

of science in England. It was the age of Newton. 
Bacon's work was telling at last, after he was dead. 
In 1652 the Royal Society was founded. The earlier 
English Latitudinarians — Falkland, Hales, Chilling- 
worth, Jeremy Taylor, and others — had watched 
and sympathised with the growing spirit. They, like 
the Latitudinarians of the Restoration, such as 
Burnet, Tillotson, and Butler, discarded the authority 
of the Church and of tradition in favour of that of 
the Bible as interpreted by human reason, proclaim- 
ing in clear language the doctrine of liberty of thought 
and advocating toleration. 

Meanwhile the Scottish Presbyterian divines had 
other work to do. Before the Restoration they had 
to carry out through changeful and troubled times 
the work of Calvin and Knox, both in regard to the 
doctrine and the discipline of the Church. That they 
used their power in a manner hostile to scientific 
advance cannot be denied. Emphasising the sterner 
aspects of their faith, they exercised a tyrannous 
supervision not only over the beliefs, but also over 
the public and private life of the people. The one 
instance of those persecutions for witchcraft whose 
cruelties many of them defended, is enough to show 
the breach between their conception of religion and 
the scientific spirit. No one who has read George 
Sinclair's, Safari 's Invisible World Discovered or Dal- 
yell's Darker Superstitions of Scotland can fail to 
perceive this. The chief service which their times 
demanded from them was the working out and form- 
ulating of a system whose immediate effect was salu- 
tary in the main, and which has produced magnificent 

228 



A Presbyterian Approach 

results in the austere strength of Scottish national 
character. But it would be as vain as it would be 
unreasonable to look to them for such a share in the 
progress of science as they would doubtless have 
taken in another age. There were among them men 
whose intellectual powers were adequate to high 
scientific achievements. Andrew Melville was Prin- 
cipal of Glasgow University, where his rare scholarship 
enabled him to teach an amazing variety of subjects, 
among which was included Natural History. Boyd 
and Calderwood were men of vast learning. The 
names of Rutherford, Gillespie, and Henderson might 
be added, and many more besides. But they had 
a special work to do which absorbed all their energies, 
and kept their interests from ranging over the wider 
field. 

The Restoration was followed by a quarter of a 
century of war and persecution in Scotland. Sir 
Walter Scott's picture of the Covenanters in Old 
Mortality is well known and has been often quoted 
— their " abhorrent condemnation of all elegant 
studies and innocent exercises, and the envenomed 
rancour of their political hatred." However much 
we may regret the one-sidedness of this estimate, and 
its failure to do justice to some of the tenderest 
hearts and most gracious spirits that have lived in 
Scotland, we need not deny that there were much 
bitterness and narrowness among them, and that one 
effect of these was rather to widen than to heal the 
breach between science and religion. But what 
would you have? When men are oppressed and 
persecuted they naturally turn their attention to the 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

point in hand. When men are fleeing for their lives 
upon the mountains, or marching in irons to the 
stake, it would hardly be reasonable to expect from 
them any considerable contribution to scientific 
investigation, or even any consuming interest in it. 

All this is the more evident when we remember 
that one result of the general upheaval of traditional 
beliefs, both scientific and religious, produced by the 
Renaissance, was a chaos of opinions and a wide- 
spread scepticism. When the Restoration suddenly 
let loose the pent-up forces which Puritanism had 
held in rigorous suppression, science and scepticism 
together became the fashion of the day. Charles II 
was keenly interested in science, especially in Chem- 
istry and Navigation. In his person and in his court 
the scientific interest was associated with the lowest 
depth of shameless and cynical immorality. When 
it was that, and that as the character of their per- 
secutors, which was the form in which science pre- 
sented itself to the Presbyterians, it is still less 
wonderful that they looked askance at it. 

Thus here again it must be affirmed that it was not 
anything inherent, but simply the circumstances and 
conditions of the time, that were responsible for the 
breach between science and religion. In that age, 
for these men, the breach was inevitable. And 
further, here again we see beneath the surface aliena- 
tion a far more important alliance in the depths. 
While apparently in opposite camps, yet the principle 
for which they contended was the same. The Scot- 
tish Presbyterians, to quote the words of Principal 
Rainy, " were afraid of the mass and bishops because 

230 






A Presbyterian Approach 

they were jealous for liberty of thought." No doubt 
it was a principle which they had not thought out to 
its conclusions, and which many of them conceived 
in a very imperfect and one-sided sense. Yet, being 
a genuine principle of liberty, it had in it the germ 
of all future emancipation for science as well as for 
religion. Lecky, after a long and ghastly account of 
the Presbyterian persecutions for witchcraft, adds, 
"The Scotch Kirk was the result of a democratic 
movement, and for some time, almost alone in 
Europe, it was the unflinching champion of political 
liberty. It was a Scotchman, Buchanan, who first 
brought liberal principles into clear relief. It was the 
Scotch clergy who upheld them with a courage that 
can hardly be overrated." John Morley writes, " It is 
not their fanaticism, still less is it their theology, which 
makes the great Puritan chiefs of England and the 
stern Covenanters of Scotland so heroic in our sight. 
It is the fact that they sought truth and ensued it, not 
thinking of the practicable nor cautiously counting 
majorities and minorities, but each man pondering 
and searching so ' as ever in the great Taskmaster's 
eye. ' ' If these testimonies are true — if it was for 
liberty and for truth that they contended — any im- 
perfections in their way of conceiving these may well 
be forgiven them. To have fought that fight and won 
it was to have done more for science than to have 
discovered a new system of Astronomy or to have 
founded a new school of Logic. 

One thing, however, must be said on the other 
side. It shall be stated in the words of the late 
Prof. J. S. Candlish. In the passage quoted he is 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

referring to Protestant theologians in general, but 
his words are certainly applicable to many in the 
Scottish Presbyterian Church. He writes, " The 
theologians of the seventeenth century . . . failed to 
apprehend a deeper principle that was implicitly 
contained in the Reformation movement, viz., that 
Christian doctrines, instead of preceding Christian 
life as a necessary means to it, must come after its 
actual experience. Sound doctrine was regarded as 
the preliminary condition of spiritual life ; and as it 
had thus to be established apart from the living 
experience of Christianity in the soul, it must rest on 
purely external authority. This was found in an 
extreme and one-sided view of the inspiration of 
Scripture, as equivalent to verbal or literal dictation, 
and in an uncritical and indiscriminate use of proof- 
texts from all portions of Scripture, without due 
regard to their historical connection and scope. 
These became to many of the divines of that age 
very much what the sentences of the fathers and 
councils had been to the schoolmen; and an undue 
weight was sometimes allowed even to the avowedly 
human forms in which Protestant doctrine had been 
expressed." At a later stage we shall find how 
largely this tendency, especially as it manifested itself 
in regard to the Scriptures, is responsible for the 
misunderstanding of the relations between science 
and religion in the Presbyterian Church. 

Passing to the eighteenth century, the eye is caught 
at once by the great blaze of the " Illumination " in 
France, associated with the names of Voltaire and the 
Encyclopedists. Voltaire, provoked by the spectacle 

232 



A Presbyterian Approach 

of many abuses and hypocrisies, devoted all the 
talents of a singularly brilliant mind to a crusade 
against the Christian religion, retaining, however, his 
belief in a personal God. The later Encyclopedists 
spent immense learning in the service of Materialism 
and Atheism. In Britain, Hume, Gibbon, and Tom 
Paine were conspicuous figures — Hume calmest and 
most fascinating of sceptics, Gibbon terrible with the 
deadly cold of his sarcasm, and Paine, the populariser 
of the ideas of the Revolution, bitterly hostile to 
Christianity. The inevitable effect of such influences 
as these was a wide-spread popular impression that 
science and religion were radically incompatible with 
one another. 

The Scottish Church during this century was stirred 
by secessions arising out of questions of Church Gov- 
ernment, and by great revivals of religion, which have 
no particular bearing on our present subject. Apart 
from these, the general tendency was towards such 
lethargy and conventionality as might naturally be 
expected to follow the violent history of the preced- 
ing century. The accession of William of Orange 
had secured toleration for Presbyterians, and the 
legislation of Queen Anne's time had induced slum- 
ber. There were, however, many representatives of 
the Church of Scotland in that century who attained 
to high eminence as philosophers, historians, mathe- 
maticians, and experts in other scientific studies. 
Some of these, men who though averse to enthu- 
siam were by no means sceptics, were on terms of 
friendship with Hume and Gibbon, and interested 
themselves in the scientific spirit of the time, at the 

233 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

risk of being identified by their critics with its infi- 
delity. The contemporary defence of Christianity 
took the form of " Evidences," intended to prove the 
necessity for a supernatural revelation. This did 
good service in its time, but like the infidelity it was 
written to combat, it was based upon an inadequate 
conception both of nature and of the supernatural, 
and it has had little permanent influence on the rela- 
tions of science and religion. 

The tremendous earthquake of the French Revolu- 
tion shook the civilised world, and set free a multi- 
tude of intellectual forces which made themselves felt 
in all directions during the early years of the nine- 
teenth century. All the sciences were studied with 
fresh interest, and a rich harvest of results appeared. 
The Church of Scotland shared in the general awaken- 
ing, which showed itself at that time along two lines in 
particular. One of these was the attempt to broaden 
the theological outlook in various directions, with 
which such men as John MacLeod Campbell were 
identified. The other was a great outburst of Evan- 
gelical enthusiasm which led to the most varied and 
far-reaching results. Among these results was the 
immediate rise and spread of Foreign Mission enter- 
prise, a factor in civilisation destined to play a more 
important part in the development of science than 
was at first imagined. Not only in the study of 
Comparative Religion and the Evolution of Religious 
Beliefs and Customs, but in such secular sciences as 
Anthropology and Geography, the missionary work 
of the Church has done no small service. 

A more important and direct alliance between 
234 



A Presbyterian Approach 

science and religion is seen in the new conception of 
Home Mission work which was another fruit of the 
evangelical movement. With the publication of 
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Sociology had 
sprung into its place among the sciences in 1776. 
The French Revolution had greatly hastened and 
increased the spread of new social theories and ideals 
throughout the world. Every living and generous 
spirit was caught by their enthusiasm, and experi- 
ments of all kinds were set on foot. In the Presby- 
terian Church, the man who did most for the alliance 
of Sociology with religion was Thomas Chalmers. A 
man of distinguished scientific attainments, he was for 
five years professor of mathematics in Saint Andrews, 
and his Astronomical Discourses were famous in their 
day. His work as a Sociologist has been before the 
public for three-quarters of a century, and he is still 
quoted as an authority by experts in that science. 
Many of his ideas remain in the Home Mission work 
of the Presbyterian Churches, which at the present 
time, in spite of all its defects, is showing something 
of that grasp of principles and that adaptability to 
new situations which so conspicuously marked him 
out as a true scientist. Chalmers proved conclusively, 
and a great record of effective work in the Pres- 
byterian Churches since his day has confirmed it, 
that in the field of Sociology at least, religion and 
science need not be kept apart. 

All these, however, were but alliances in special 
departments, and they did not touch the fact of an 
apparently radical difference. It was the new 
Geology that brought matters to a crisis. In 1830 

235 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

Lyell published his Principles of Geology, but long 
before that date Geology had been demanding 
periods of time for its operations which were wholly 
incompatible with the literal acceptance of the Mosaic 
account of creation in seven days. Chalmers, with 
characteristic insight, had many years previously 
said that " the writings of Moses do not fix the an- 
tiquity of the globe." On the other hand, of course 
there were many who clung to their old belief, and de- 
nounced the new science, while there must have been 
a very general feeling of perplexity and uneasiness. 

At length a school arose which became so popular 
that it may be regarded as typical of Presbyterian 
thought in the middle of the nineteenth century. 
We may call it the School of Reconciliation, for its 
object was to so explain the Bible record as to do away 
with the apparent contradictions between that and 
the ascertained results of science. Hugh Miller may 
be taken as its representative exponent. Originally 
a stone-mason in the north of Scotland, he was a man 
of extraordinary natural gifts and of wide reading. 
Attracted first of all by the ripple-marks on the bed 
of a quarry where he was working, the science of Geol- 
ogy became first his relaxation and then his province 
of expert enquiry. His book on The Old Red Sand- 
stone drew the applause of Mr. Huxley. His most sig- 
nificant doctrine, and that which best represented the 
views of the Reconciliation School, is that the Book 
of Genesis is to be read in the same way as Prophecy, 
i.e., in the light of its accomplishment. " The hiero- 
glyphs that speak of the past are wonderfully easy to 
harmonise — those for the future are invincibly diffi- 

236 






A Presbyterian Approach 

cult and inexplicable." In his Testimony of the Rocks 
he goes on to apply this principle to Genesis. The 
six days he takes to be six periods of indefinitely 
long duration, representative visions of the progress 
of creation. He adds, " rightly understood, I know 
not a single truth that militates against the minutest 
and least prominent of its (Genesis) details." 

This system of reconciliations, which clung to the 
scientific accuracy of the Scripture record and yet 
interpreted that record so as to make it harmonise 
with modern discoveries, was as we have stated ex- 
tremely popular in its day, and it is in some quarters 
popular yet. It has even been applied to Evolution, 
and attempts have been made so to interpret the first 
chapters of Genesis as to make them harmonise with 
that theory. Hugh Miller, however, held the doctrine 
of development to be irreconcilable with the dogmas 
of Christianity, and argued against it in favour of the 
miracle of creation. When in 1859 the Origin of 
Species appeared, the great majority of Presbyterians 
considered that its teaching could not possibly be 
reconciled with the Bible record, and they confidently 
believed that the doctrine of Evolution would eventu- 
ally be disproved and set aside. It was of no avail 
to plead that Evolution must be regarded as but 
a method of creation, and that it did not affect the 
ultimate question of divine agency, for to the majority 
of its critics it appeared evident that it was not the 
method described in Genesis. 

It is surprising that so precarious an apologetic 
should completely have satisfied the minds of so many. 
Certainly there could be no permanent stability, no 

237 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

feeling of intellectual rest, in a faith which was calling 
for constant readjustment of this sort. No one could 
tell what a day might bring forth of new scientific 
discovery which might demand of faith a fresh re- 
modelling of interpretations or force it into a priori 
hostility. A further objection to this method was that 
it tended rather to strengthen than to diminish the 
already exaggerated estimate of the moral value of 
orthodox intellectual opinions, and so to distract men's 
minds from the sense of the value of truth in itself. 
This exaggerated moral value, with its background 
of punishments and rewards supposed to be meted 
out on the grounds of orthodoxy or heterodoxy, could 
not fail to bias men's minds and widen the breach. 
One of the popular advocates of this point of view 
actually sneered at " the idol " of Truth which clever 
men were worshipping. Again, it greatly fostered the 
vicious distinction between faith and reason, when 
reason was permitted only to deal with questions on 
which no part of Scripture pronounces, and Scripture 
was established as a kind of secret court, or Star Cham- 
ber, for judging all matters of all kinds which happen 
to be referred to within the boards of the sacred book. 
Finally, in those cases where Scripture had to be re- 
interpreted, another most dangerous principle was 
introduced. If such reinterpretation be necessary 
or legitimate, it is evident that Scripture does not 
mean what to the plain man it seems to say. There 
is a hidden meaning, symbolical or allegorical, which 
lies behind the apparent sense of the narrative, and 
which is intelligible only to the initiated. The more 
ingenious the reinterpretation is, the further it is re- 

238 



A Presbyterian Approach 

moved from the understanding of the ordinary- 
reader. It is difficult to see what logical stopping- 
place there is for those who take this view, short of 
the subtleties of Origen. 

All through this history, in spite of casual alliances 
and fundamental points of agreement, it has been 
evident that something, mysteriously but effectually, 
was holding religion and science apart. We have 
already had broad hints as to what that thing was ; 
it became plain when the battle of the Higher Criti- 
cism came to be fought out in Scotland. The situation 
is thus described by the late Professor Candlish : — 
" By many the need is felt of more thoroughly carry- 
ing out the principles of the Reformation than was 
done in the succeeding age, so as to place the dog- 
matic system on a surer basis. . . . By a large num- 
ber of divines it has been felt to be unsatisfactory 
to base, as was practically done formerly, the whole 
system of theology on the one doctrine of the inspi- 
ration of Scripture ; and a broader foundation, as well 
as a more living conception, has been sought for it, 
by recognising as its subject-matter, not merely the 
sayings of Scripture, but that living Christianity 
which it is the direct object of the Bible to produce 
and reveal. This is really a taking up and carrying 
out more fully of the principles of the Reformation." 
These are words of the most far-reaching significance, 
but it is especially as they concern inspiration that 
we have to do with them here. 

Luther's doctrine of inspiration was amusingly 
elastic, and his canons of judgment subjective in the 
extreme. Calvin's doctrine, though stricter and more 

239 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

articulate, was still broad and free. Afterwards the 
doctrine grew rigid and the controversies of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries tended to embitter it. 
The seat of authority in religion had indeed been 
shifted from the Church and Tradition, and this had 
been done on the plea of the spiritual man's right to 
judge of truth for himself. But that right was imme- 
diately handed over to the inspired Scriptures, which 
became the new seat of authority, and were regarded 
more and more rigidly as infallible on every subject 
with which they dealt, a province closed to human 
reason. Among other results entailed by that a view 
was this, that every statement in the Bible which 
refers to the facts of the physical universe must 
be regarded as uttering the accurate scientific truth 
upon its subject. As late as the eighteenth cen- 
tury, the Hutchinsonians in England maintained 
not only that the Bible was infallible on scientific 
matters, but that it was the only reliable authority on 
Natural Philosophy. " To Newton's Principia they 
opposed what they called l Moses ' Principia.' The 
former they regarded as thoroughly false, and also 
as materialistic and atheistic in tendency." While 
Scottish Presbyterianism never committed itself to 
any such absurdities, it is significant that President 
Forbes of Culloden looked upon the Hutchinsonian 
system with favour. 

At length, in the later years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland faced the 
question of the inspiration of the Bible. The smoke 
of that long battle has hardly yet cleared away, and 
there remain many differences of opinion. There are 

240 



A Presbyterian Approach 

those who still hold to the most sweeping doctrine 
of the infallibility of Scripture in regard to scientific as 
to all other truth. Many points in criticism are re- 
garded as open questions by almost every one, and 
many more are so regarded by large numbers of edu- 
cated Presbyterians. But one point at least has been 
conceded by the vast majority, viz., that the Bible is 
no longer to be viewed as a scientific text-book but as 
the record of a spiritual revelation. That revelation, 
which God made of Himself to man, was expressed 
(as many hold) in various forms of myth, poetry, his- 
tory, and others. The revelation, which its record 
shews growing ever clearer and fuller with the growth 
of the nation's life and thought, is an eternal and divine 
thing ; the form in which it was expressed is human and 
temporary. The scientific ideas of any part of the Bible 
are simply those of the age when that part was written 
— neither more nor less accurate than the rest of con- 
temporary science. It is this point more than any 
other which bears upon our subject. The battle be- 
tween science and Scripture is one thing, the battle 
between science and religion is a very different thing; 
yet half the controversies of the past have arisen 
solely from confounding these two. Dr. Flint has 
said that " so long as men's beliefs as to things were 
regulated not by evidence but by authority, there 
could be no science." When the scientific authority 
of Scripture is surrendered, science is set free to 
work out its own results; and the doctrine of inspira- 
tion, by giving up the claim of the Bible to teach 
science, has saved its power to teach religion. 

At first sight this might appear to be a curtailing 
16 241 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

and narrowing of the field of revelation, but on re- 
flection it is seen to be an immense widening of that 
field. The facts of science may not be the facts of 
Genesis, but (to quote the memorable words of Prin- 
cipal Rainy, spoken in the most recent debate on 
this subject) "the facts are God's facts." So far 
from discrediting revelation by refusing to regard the 
science of the Bible as part of it, we strengthen the 
idea of revelation and honour it. The Bible remains 
the unique book of the revelation of spiritual knowl- 
edge : but the book of Nature, whose pages science 
turns, is also seen to be a book of revelation. Nay, 
so far as its subject goes, it is, as Dr. Flint has called 
it, " the primary, universal, and inexhaustible text- 
book of divine revelation." 

Through the change which we have been describ- 
ing it has become possible for us to gather in the 
harvest of the past. We have seen that when the 
doctrine of Evolution was first propounded by Dar- 
win, it was generally rejected by Presbyterian Scots- 
men, because it could not be harmonised with the 
creation narratives of Genesis. Now, though it is by 
no means the case that all Presbyterians accept the 
doctrine, yet the general tendency is toward accept- 
ing it, and it is almost universally allowed by those 
who are competent to judge, that it is a legitimate 
hypothesis, to be proved or disproved by scientific 
evidence alone. The brilliant writings of the late 
Prof. Henry Drummond have done much to bring 
about the result that there is a large and increas- 
ing number who find in it a friend in disguise — ■ 
an instance of the truth of Mr. A. J. Balfour's say- 

242 



A Presbyterian Approach 

ing, that " a theological stumbling-block may be a 
religious aid." To quote Dr. Flint once more — 
and no Presbyterian writer lives whose words in this 
connection should carry more weight — "Forty years 
ago the fear that philosophy, and especially theology, 
would be ruined by the doctrine of Evolution was 
widely prevalent. All fear of the kind has now 
almost vanished, and there are few educated and 
intelligent persons who do not recognise that what 
was then regarded as a terrible danger to religion 
and theology is, and must be, of incalculable value 
to both." To the majority of thinking men to-day it 
offers a nobler conception of the divine attributes and 
methods, and it supplies them with one of the most 
valuable unifying principles which they possess. 

It is evidently hopeless in one short chapter to 
attempt to deal with anything more than the merest 
fragment of so large a question. It has seemed 
wisest to confine our enquiries to that part of the 
conflict and rapprochement with which the Presby- 
terian Church has been particularly identified. Be- 
yond this there lie vast fields of study on each 
of which the rapprochement must be and is being 
effected. On all of these Presbyterianism is taking 
its share along with other Christian Churches, in the 
general progress of thought. Against Agnosticism, 
it asserts that the knowledge of spiritual realities is a 
real department of knowledge, in the strictest sense 
rational. In this there can be no conflict with science, 
which also rests upon knowledge which is beyond 
the sphere of sense-experience, and which may be 
rightly classed as spiritual. The claim of real knowl- 

243 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

edge in the spiritual region is also its answer to 
Materialism, which appears more and more mani- 
festly to be an obsolete theory of the universe; and 
whose few remaining exponents, finding themselves 
left behind, are growing irritable. The relation of 
the religious belief in prayer and in miracles to the 
scientific doctrine of law and of the unity of nature 
and her forces, is a matter which as yet requires to 
be thought out. The trend of thought concerning 
these questions is toward a view in which they will 
be no longer regarded as breaches of natural law, 
but as cases in which a greater unity reveals itself in 
the operation of laws of a higher order than those of 
Physics and Biology. This leads to the considera- 
tion of the general relations of mind to matter and 
the operation of psychical and higher spiritual forces: 
it is as yet almost a terra incognita, but there are 
many signs that in this region also research will be 
rewarded by knowledge. 

So far as we have gone, the history of the past, 
viewed by the light in which the newer conception 
of the Bible has placed it, shows that at the present 
point in the progress of thought, science and religion 
are not in the least degree at strife. They need no 
reconciliation. "The facts are God's facts," and the 
scientific knowledge of them is God's ever new and 
wonderful revelation, unfolding itself not in one book, 
closed two thousand years ago, but in every book 
written to-day by any honest and competent investi- 
gator. Looking forward, we wait for new light, not 
only without trembling for the faith, but with eager 
curiosity that we may understand our faith more per- 

244 



A Presbyterian Approach 

fectly. Looking back, along the line of the history 
of Presbyterianism, we see a long czntroversy. due 
mainly to a misunierstartulitg. But behind and be- 
neath all the controversy, we are proud to recognise 
in Presbyterian faith the basal principles of all true 
science — the demand for unify and order, and the 
assertion of the rights of intellect. 

JOHN KELMAN. J"N. 
Edinburgh. 



: 45 



A CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
APPROACH 

The Rev. RONALD BAYNE, M.A. 
Editor " Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity" etc., Eifth Book 

THE phrase, " ideals of science and religion," im- 
plies that science as well as religion has ideals. 
But this implication is a large one. It has been ar- 
gued by many philosophers that " ideals " is merely 
the vaguest and most general term to express those 
things which religion describes definitely and con- 
cretely as God, the soul, and salvation. According 
to this view, if words are used exactly, science can 
have no ideals. By using the word science goes be- 
yond what is and what she observes and concerns 
herself with what ought to be. She begins, therefore, 
to use the faculty of faith, and to usurp the province 
of religion. 

It is necessary to say this at starting because a 
statement of the ideals of the Church of England, if 
it is to begin at the beginning, requires a statement 
of the general philosophical positions involved in that 
Church's theology. Such a philosophical sketch 
cannot be attempted in this paper; but it must be 
premised that neither religion nor science can give 
any account of themselves, without philosophy; and 
that, although few men are philosophers, yet all men 

246 



A Church of England Approach 

rest their daily work and conduct upon certain broad 
conceptions of life which become philosophies as 
soon as they are enquired into and systematised. 

It is also necessary to note on the other hand that 
a scientific man might reject ideals of all sorts as un- 
scientific and tending to confuse and mislead the 
mind, so that for science as well as for religion a dis- 
cussion of the significance of ideals should precede 
the use of the word. 

As a matter of fact, however, scientific men as a 
class have their ideals. In one of Mr. H. G. Wells' 
stories of the days to come, the doctor of the future 
explains the scientific point of view to a patient: 
" We get on with research," he says ; " we give 
advice when people have the sense to ask for it, 
and we bide our time. . . . We hardly know enough 
yet to take over the management. . . . Science is 
young yet. It 's got to keep on growing for a few 
generations. We know enough now to know we 
don't know enough yet. . . . Some of us have a sort 
of fancy that in time we may know enough to take 
over a little more than the ventilation and drains." 

The scientific man in this passage aspires to be a 
priest and a king. He is not content to look upon 
science as research only. His knowledge is to be 
power. Mr. Wells indeed does not shrink from 
criticism of the ideals of management which may 
obtain when scientific men are kings. Few readers 
will forget the grim picture of the unskilled labourer, 
lying drugged and senseless till he is wanted again, 
which is given us in "The First Men in the Moon." 
That romance is in the main an effort to imagine a 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

purely intellectual civilisation, a civilisation evolved by- 
pure science where there are no emotions to interfere 
and disturb. Mr. Wells, as in the main a sympathiser 
with scientific aspirations, may be allowed to criticise 
them. The religious man must not forget to be thank- 
ful first that there are aspirations to criticise. He must 
be thankful that the scientific man consents to have 
a scheme of things as they might be and as they are 
not. By so doing, the man of science becomes own 
brother to the Christian, however much his scheme 
of things clashes with that formulated by the relig- 
ious temperament. Mr. Wells, moreover, in the 
passage first quoted, is probably wrong in the sugges- 
tion that science will take charge of life suddenly. 
Every bit of clear knowledge gained imposes the re- 
sponsibility of acting upon that knowledge and in- 
flicts a penalty for its suppression. Science must 
gain its control as it goes along, and in fact does so 
gain it. And it is a delusion that only clergymen 
and religious folk refuse to apply knowledge to life. 
No man escapes that temptation ; least of all men of 
science. In so far as men of science are in contact 
with actual life, as doctors, as temperance legislators, 
as inspectors of factories and guardians of public 
health, they are tempted to make terms with the 
world and the flesh, which even when the devil is 
ignored as illusory, are as strong as ever to prevent 
the whole truth and nothing but the truth from pre- 
vailing among men. It is necessary to the welfare 
of the world that men of science should have ideals ; 
that they should be eager to apply their knowledge 
to life ; and resolute to build their new Jerusalem. 

248 



A Church of England Approach 

But the capacity to acquire knowledge is not the 
passion to impose it upon an unwilling world. There 
is a singular passage in Browning's " Christmas Eve," 
which insists that the worst man upon earth knows 
more about right or wrong, although he does not 
apply his knowledge to life, than the best man suc- 
ceeds in so applying. Man's chief need, it is argued, 
is a motive to make him use his knowledge ; continu- 
ally that hell gapes for him — the hell of complete 
knowledge of what there is to do combined with an 
utter inability to do it. Mr. Wells, for all his sympa- 
thy with science, has had his visions of that dolorous 
place. 

Let us now consider this matter of ideals from 
another side. It is a frequent complaint against the 
orthodox Christian that he makes one book of the 
Bible. He is told that it is a library, or collection, 
or anthology of the literature of the Jews, with 
no more claim to be considered a book than the 
"Oratores Attici" or the "Corpus Poetarum Latin- 
orum ; " it is, in fact, a more heterogeneous collection 
than either of these works. The sensible Christian will 
answer that neither Greece nor Rome made such an 
anthology as the Bible from their literature ; and that 
while the external form of the books of the Bible is 
heterogeneous, their aim and spirit overcome differ- 
ences and stamp one character upon the collection. 
The Bible describes man as failing to reach the level 
of righteousness demanded by his conscience, and 
God as intervening to help man. In the language of 
orthodox Christianity it is the history of man as the 
subject of redemption; in the language of the non- 
249 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

Christian it is the history of a nation conceived of as 
the history of the ideals of the nation. Even though 
our philosophy compels us to reject ideals as illusory, 
the Bible must always be unique as a witness to their 
power. Moreover, the fact is plain that neither Greece 
nor Rome conceived of their history from this point 
of view, whereas the Bible is in a true sense one 
book because the Jewish race did so conceive of 
their history. Moreover, this book was not written 
by a man, but in sober fact by a nation. That gives 
the result externally a character of heterogeneity, but 
makes its internal homogeneity all the more vital 
and satisfying. The book describes man's effort to 
establish the kingdom of God ; it insists that God 
has assisted that effort; and finally crowned it by 
the life and death in the world of the Son of God. 
The Bible throughout puts God first It never con- 
ceives of the good in man as apart from God. God 
is the power which continually is dragging man up- 
ward and continually compelling man to realise his 
true destiny. From this point of view there is no 
other phenomenon in the world at all like the Bible. 
That is the accurate fact. When that fact is recog- 
nised opinions about it may be divided broadly into 
three classes. First, we may take up the extreme 
materialist position that ideals are delusions and 
therefore noxious, and that even if they have been 
of service in the past we must, as far as may be, dis- 
card them in the future. Second, we may hold that 
these ideals are nothing but man's projection of him- 
self objectively into the world around him ; they 
come from man himself; man himself makes the 

250 



A Church of England Approach 

God who is a Spirit, just as he made the God of 
wood or stone ; but yet ideals are not noxious ; they 
are necessary to the progress of the race, and by the 
help of them man continues to go forward. But, 
thirdly, we may argue that ideals owe their force 
entirely to our faith in their reality. If we must give 
that faith up we must give the ideals up too. We 
can only drift with the stream of life, we cannot 
aspire to any control of our course. God made by 
man can never be the same as God the Maker of 
man. These ideals which we, metaphorically speak- 
ing, throw up into the air, can only fall back upon 
us ; they cannot draw us upward as a Hand can held 
out from above. Such reasoning insists that ideals 
must be true if they are to lead up and not down, 
and it makes the value of the ideals of the Bible 
dependent upon the reality of God and the soul. 
Theists and Christians belong to this third class. 

But the Bible is not a philosophical treatise. The 
scientific man, if he were true to his own science, 
would appreciate and approve the fact that the Bible 
is not a piece of reasoning ; it is an experiment, it is 
an action. We are asked to accept it first of all as 
happening. Its character is essentially altered if it 
can be proved to be historically worthless. This 
position, indeed, is disputed in unexpected quarters. 
It has been argued by an influential and able school 
of religious thought that the historical character of 
the Bible does not matter. Kant is appealed to as 
teaching that the practical reason which apprehends 
and acts upon religious truth is a different faculty 
from the critical reason which decides what the facts 

251 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

of history have been. But this is a disastrous posi- 
tion for the religious man to take up. It is probably 
impossible for the practical reason to make any judg- 
ment which does not involve to some extent the 
critical reason; and the scientific man will not be 
encouraged to accept religious teaching by being 
told that his critical faculty has no relation to it and 
can pass no judgment upon it. It cannot be a matter 
of indifference whether or not Jesus was deceived 
about Himself, or whether or not the disciples were 
deceived about His resurrection, any more than it 
can be a matter of indifference whether man made 
God or God made man. The existence of Chris- 
tianity as a religion is involved in the point. It is 
true that no man is a Christian merely because he 
considers it proved that Jesus rose from the dead; 
but some such facts which depend for acceptance upon 
the exercise of our critical faculty, are the bases of all 
our fuller judgments. Just because the religious man 
goes beyond the critical reason he can never afford 
to ignore it. Loyalty to it is the beginning of all 
loyalty, the foundation of all religion. And to re- 
fuse metaphysic is to make " the great refusal," 
whether the refusal is made in the interests of science 
or of religion. 

This digression which touches hurriedly upon a 
matter much discussed at present, started from the 
statement that the Bible is a record of facts. The 
Old Testament records the effort of a nation to 
be God's chosen people. The result of the effort 
was the coming of the Christ, which meant that 
the effort was transferred from one nation to all 

252 



A Church of England Approach 

nations. All nations in the New Testament are in- 
vited to accept that view of their duty and destiny 
which in the Old Testament is put forward as essen- 
tial to the spiritual welfare of the Jews. But this is 
to state the case from the purely analytic and critical 
point of view, which cannot include God in its analy- 
sis, except as a magnet of which nothing is known 
but its attractive power upon man's character. The 
Christian, using other faculties with his critical 
reason, believes that the Old Testament records the 
effort of God as well as the effort of man, and that in 
the New Testament God's purpose of redemption 
culminates in Jesus, who is God and Man, and in 
whom the will of God and the will of Man are united 
in a perfect service and a perfect freedom. Jesus is 
the perfect King, and He is also the perfect people. 

It is difficult to understand how popular Chris- 
tianity has been able to persuade itself that the Gos- 
pels appeal to the individual only, and require only 
that he should make his own peace with God through 
trust in the message and person of Jesus. No one 
can compare the Pentateuch and the Gospels with- 
out perceiving that the teaching of Jesus, following 
up in this respect the teaching of the prophets, en- 
riches and enlarges the personality of the individual, 
takes him out of his family clan or nation, and 
isolates him in a new reality of responsibility. We 
carelessly say " isolates him," but we mean " creates 
him," " makes him more." If the individual con- 
sents to be isolated and cuts himself off from the 
clan or corporation that has bred him, his develop- 
ment will stop. He must, on the contrary, continu- 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

ally react on his clan, on his station and duties, 
and thus produce a clan and a kingdom able to 
breed more highly developed creatures than himself. 
A candid and intelligent study of the Gospels will 
admit the large place taken up in the teaching of 
Jesus by His exposition of the Kingdom. The 
Kingdom of the heavens or the Kingdom of God 
and His own relation to this Kingdom, — that is the 
sum of His message ; and He begins His preaching 
with the announcement of the Kingdom as some- 
thing which the Jews ought to be ready for; as 
something which their history, as summarised in the 
Old Testament, has prepared them for. The King- 
dom Jesus proclaims is the familiar theocracy, so 
feebly realised under David and Josiah, but imagined 
by the prophets with great depth and beauty of 
spiritual insight. Jesus recalls the right ideal of this 
Kingdom, renouncing emphatically the additions and 
distortions of pride and materialism, but essentially 
His account of the Kingdom is not new but old, — 
the final form and fulfilling of the ideals of Moses, 
David, and the Prophets. What is new in the Gos- 
pels is Jesus. And therefore it is only gradually 
that Jesus can bring forward the subject of His 
relation to the Kingdom. There is a striking con- 
trast between the challenge of the Kingdom flung 
down among the Jews as an ideal familiar to their 
consciences, and the cautious suggestion of Himself 
as the appointed means by which alone this Kingdom 
can be realised among men. Indeed the teaching 
of Jesus about Himself is subordinated to the facts 
about Himself: His death, His rising again, and the 

254 



A Church of England Approach 

coming of the Holy Ghost, — these are the essentials 
by which we men are enabled to carry forward the 
purpose of God that His will should be done in 
earth as in heaven, and earth become, like heaven, 
God's Kingdom. Jesus by His incarnation, death, 
and resurrection, gives to the citizen of His Kingdom 
a motive for service incomparably stronger than any 
afforded to the Jew of the Old Testament; and 
Jesus gives more, — He gives the Holy Ghost; He 
rallies the will of the citizen who enrols himself in 
the Kingdom, by the continual gift of grace. 

This the Christian believes. And he claims that 
Jesus Christ has made a difference in the history of 
the world which can be explained only by the truth 
of the faith just stated. In the first place the effort 
to realise the Kingdom of God upon earth was by 
the coming of Christ transferred at once from Pales- 
tine to the whole civilised world. When Jesus was 
alive the civilised world was controlled by the two 
races of Rome and Greece. Politically the civilised 
world was controlled by Rome. That Graeco-Roman 
civilisation represented a high-water mark of human 
development. It is only quite recently that we have 
reached again the same point of intellectual and 
practical vigour. The odds in the first century must 
have seemed tremendous against a mere barbarian 
Jew converting to his religion the Athenian and the 
Roman. But this the Christians did, as their obvious 
and simple duty, without flinching or faltering. The 
Roman control of the world became a means for 
the Christian control of the world. The old theo- 
cratic ideal was realised in an empire comprising 

2 55 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

all the leading races of the world, and realised more 
intimately and thoroughly than it had been realised 
in the small nation of the Hebrews in Old Testament 
times. It was realised so thoroughly that the theo- 
cratic kingdom in its external framework persisted 
when the Roman Empire broke up. The Roman 
Empire handed on to mediaeval and modern times 
a Church which in its outward form realised the 
idea of a single world-empire more completely than 
the Roman Empire itself. The Christians of the 
early centuries had not a number of separate nations 
to deal with, they had the Roman Empire to deal 
with; and they succeeded in imposing the Chris- 
tian religion upon the Roman Empire. That their 
Kingdom of God was perfect is not contended. It 
was too big and too concrete a thing to be perfect. 
Too many minds and peoples and generations co- 
operated in the work. But it is essential that God's 
Kingdom be concrete. You begin to make it come 
when you attack some kingdom-refusing word, like 
" secular," or " civil/' or " political," or " profane," 
or " state," or " temporal," and annex it in Christ's 
name. You begin to make it come when you take 
some piece of human activity, some kind of work 
or play, in which men act together, and make it, 
in fact, Christian, — obedient to Christ. Especially 
do you begin to make it come when you claim for 
Christ your nation, — the concrete reality which is 
God's challenge to you to make His Kingdom come. 
For an individual to accept Christ is one thing; for 
the nation to which the individual belongs to accept 
Christ is another. And this is the plain broad 

256 



A Church of England Approach 

meaning of the Old Testament which is in the New 
Testament impressed upon all men, that the indi- 
vidual is not to rest satisfied unless his nation, as 
well as himself, is striving to be Christian. Such 
a Christian nation is a Christian Church. By what 
arrangements this spiritual fact is to be expressed 
is a matter subordinate to the fundamental principle, 
to the vital faith, that the nation ought to be a 
Church — a conscious expression of God's will. It is 
clear in the New Testament that Jesus condemns and 
rejects much of the Jewish effort to realise the 
Kingdom of God, as neither spiritual nor righteous. 
The Kingdom as Jesus defines it is not to be main- 
tained by force or violence; the desire to serve 
others is the motive of its rulers; a desire which 
culminates in the willingness to suffer for others. 
This desire is inspired by Jesus Himself; it depends 
upon the surrender of the heart and will to His 
message of God's love as revealed in Himself. This 
general exposition of the meaning of the Kingdom 
must be understood and accepted before we decide 
the question whether Jesus laid down for His King- 
dom any special institutions, such, for instance, as 
Baptism and the Lord's Supper. These are not 
mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount. But it 
is an extraordinary interpretation of the Sermon 
on the Mount to suppose that it is intended to be 
practised in vacuo, Jesus gives us principles which 
are to be intruded into every conceivable activity 
of the human spirit. His disciple is a man bent 
on bringing this about. To lose this ambition is 
to lose Christ. It will not be found that the sur- 
17 2 57 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

render of the soul to Christ can continue if the soul 
declines citizenship in Christ's Kingdom ; and the 
narrower and more selfish a man's conception of 
Christ's Kingdom and its claims, the smaller his 
soul. Christ's Kingdom is not come till everything 
in human life and society is "ordered" by God's 
will. 

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the 
Puritan insisted that in the sphere of conduct Christ's 
teaching was to be followed. But because he con- 
ceived art and music to involve evil conduct he set 
his face against these activities. It is important to 
understand clearly where the Puritan was right and 
where he was wrong. He was right in claiming 
society and politics for Christ. Calvin's attempt to 
make the Kingdom of God come in Geneva was 
heroic and splendid, in spite of its mistakes. But 
such an effort, being most difficult, being indeed the 
ultimate and only effort demanded from man's spirit, 
is continually deflected from its true goal by two 
temptations. The unspiritual weapons of force and 
expediency are not rejected ; the tired and depressed 
Christian ceases to put away from him methods 
which seem short cuts at times when his spiritual 
eyesight is dimmed. Moreover in his desperation he 
limits the field of his endeavour. When men are 
seeking amusement and rest the temptation is strong 
to relax the moral standard. The Puritan in conse- 
quence conceives of amusement as essentially indul- 
gence and therefore not to be " ordered " by God's 
governance, but suppressed altogether. Art and 
poetry and music he thinks of as pleasure-giving ac- 

258 



A Church of England Approach 

tivities. It is easier to abolish them than to regulate 
them. But this attitude of the Puritan is a refusal to 
follow Christ. It is just when the task of establish- 
ing Christ's Kingdom becomes difficult and delicate 
that it becomes real and spiritual. The world's re- 
fusal to belong to the Kingdom of God has hardly 
retarded it more than the saint's anxiety to make 
man's nature small enough for him to reform it easily 
and quickly. The condemnation of any natural 
activity of the human spirit — and of course amuse- 
ment and rest are kinds of activity, — is a blasphemy 
against God. We have learned chiefly from the 
writings of John Ruskin to perceive the blasphemy 
of the Puritan attitude towards poetry, music, and 
art, but Evangelical Christians have not yet under- 
stood with any proper conviction the full extent of 
the injury done to their efforts to realise Christ's 
Kingdom by this blasphemy. The injury is just as 
obvious and deplorable in the maimed Kingdom as 
in the unreclaimed world. 

The Jew was called upon to establish the Kingdom 
of God in his own nation. The primitive Christian 
established it in the Roman Empire. The Roman 
Empire was his nation. The religious and social 
convulsion which we call broadly the Reformation 
was in part an effort to bring the mediaeval Church 
into more vital connection with the nations of Europe. 
A Church which had been a sufficient and suitable 
organisation to give scope to the establishment of 
God's Kingdom in a world-empire was in many ways 
unsuitable for the same task in a company of rival 
nations, all of them in their beginnings anxious to 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

secure their own national life and character. It was 
not surprising that the mediaeval Church should cling 
to her Empire organisation as a clear fulfilment of 
the universality of the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, 
and should fail to perceive that in fact the political 
Empire caused the universal frame in which her in- 
stitutions were cast, so that when the political empire 
broke up a new task was set for the Christian to 
achieve. No honest and sensible student of medi- 
aeval times will fail to perceive how truly the medi- 
aeval " Empire"- Church was the nursery of the 
European nationalities. The European nations in 
their beginnings were moulded and vitalised by the 
Christian Church to an extent difficult for us to-day 
to realise adequately. But when the nations were 
full grown, a new problem began to confront the 
Christian. It is not easy with the Bible before us to 
argue that an universal Church and his own soul 
are all that concerns the Christian. If that universal 
Church is to be a real thing it must be an aspect of a 
political reality existing in the world. If there is no 
" parliament of man," no " federation of the world," 
there can for the time be no world-church in the con- 
crete sense demanded by Jesus. The Roman Church 
at present is too old or too young. She has not 
adapted herself successfully to the political condi- 
tions of modern Europe, or admitted the necessity of 
such an adaptation. The Roman Catholic has no 
more warrant from Jesus to define and limit the forms 
of political development among nations than the 
Puritan has warrant to forbid amusements and dis- 
courage art. Both Roman and Puritan have to intro- 

260 



A Church of England Approach 

duce the Kingdom of God everywhere, — into all 
human forms of government — plutocratic, demo- 
cratic, aristocratic, and monarchical ; and into all 
moods and activities of the human mind. So soon 
as this general principle is practised, it is found to be 
in useful accord with the other general principle, that 
the rulers in God's Kingdom are servants whose rule 
vitally and finally depends upon the free consent and 
surrender of the spirit to God's will. There is a 
sense in which the Christian is to take the world as 
he finds it when engaged in establishing God's King- 
dom. If he refuses, he finds at the last that he has 
limited and maimed that Kingdom. 

In the reign of Elizabeth, the Church of England 
and the Church of Rome severed their connection 
with each other as organisations. It is well to bear 
in mind that spiritual bonds cannot be cut. Mother 
and daughter remain mother and daughter in spite of 
renouncings and disinheritings. Any two organisa- 
tions, which accept honestly the Bible and the Nicene 
Creed as documents of their faith, will be spiritually 
akin, however laboriously and elaborately they dis- 
tinguish themselves in externals. But in Elizabeth's 
reign the effort to realise God's Kingdom for the 
English nation was very unanimously by Englishmen 
taken out of the control of the Roman Church. 
However we judge daughter and mother, we cannot 
deny that the daughter's mind was clear. In Eliza- 
beth's reign the Church of England was the English 
Church. The large majority of laity and clergy 
acquiesced in the Elizabethan settlement. Unless 
we place succession in the bishops alone, we shall 

261 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

feel that the Church of England has been a continu- 
ous organism ever since its first foundation in this 
country. It is not till Commonwealth times that its 
claim to be the nation's Church can be reasonably 
contested. In England to-day it is Nonconformity 
rather than Roman Catholicism which in the eyes of 
Englishmen weakens the claim of the Church of 
England to be the Christian Church of the English 
people. A body of Englishmen so large in point of 
numbers, intelligence, and energy, that to cut it out 
of the English nation maims and alters that nation, 
stands aside from the old Church of the nation, and 
refuses to belong to it or to use it. There is there- 
fore no such national Church to-day in England as 
there was among the Jews in David's time, or even 
as there was in England in mediaeval times. There 
is no such national Church as there might be ! The 
trouble is that nobody minds. To be the only 
Church in England rather than to be the English 
Church satisfies some ; to be " free " satisfies others. 
It is difficult to connect either ideal with the teach- 
ing of Jesus about the Kingdom. In Elizabeth's 
reign men thought differently. The Elizabethan 
Nonconformist even more passionately than the Con- 
formist desired an English Church. As soon as he 
could he established his vision of an English Church. 
We Englishmen to-day have very largely lost this 
passion for the establishment in our nation of the 
Church which we can claim to be our national realisa- 
tion of God's kingdom. 

The Nonconformists have undergone a change in 
their aim and point of view ; instead of suffering and 

262 



A Church of England Approach 

dying, that their conception of Christ's Kingdom may 
be established in their nation, they have become con- 
tented to suffer that their political disabilities may be 
removed. The emancipation of spiritual religion 
from the forms of political life is the modern ideal. 
The subjugation of the forms of political life to spirit- 
ual religion was the ideal of the sixteenth-century 
Puritan. Can there be any doubt which is the nobler, 
which is the truer to Christ's teaching? Can a 
Christian be satisfied with the general impression he 
gets from a glance at Australia and the United States? 
That general impression is that the religious bodies 
are all " free," all severed from any vital connection 
with political life; and that the state also is " free," 
free in the sense that religion is less and less any of 
its concern as a state. That those who claim to be 
the spiritual descendants of Luther and Calvin and 
Knox are satisfied with this result is as perplexing as 
it is discouraging. Our only consolation is that we 
understand tolerance and do not burn and slay each 
other as men did in the sixteenth century. But 
what is the moral value to us of our toleration? It 
may mean, it very largely does mean, merely that we 
think more of comfort and less of duty than our fore- 
fathers did. Cruelty is a detestable vice ; but pain is 
not the worst evil ; and if we have left off burning 
each other only or mainly because it hurts, we are 
not therefore stronger or braver. Softness, not holi- 
ness, is our achievement. One thing is certain, that 
by suffering, by patient and magnanimous endurance 
of persecution and ill-will, Christ's Kingdom is spread. 
The Nonconformist vitally and finally leaves the 
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Ideals of Science and Faith 

English Church when he gives up the ambition to 
have a national Church. If we had space we might 
discuss the ethics of the sixteenth-century practice of 
going into opposition till you could get your own 
way about the nation's Church. That at all events 
was the beginning of Nonconformity as we know it 
to-day. It was at first emphatically Nonconformity 
within the Church. It was as ardently anxious for 
a national Church as any conformity itself. There 
is no doubt that the English Church has suffered, like 
the Nonconformists, by a lowering of her ideal of 
dominion ; she has confused herself with tales of the 
wickedness of the Inquisition until she has almost 
persuaded herself that the Lord Jesus Christ meant 
nothing particular or concrete or visible by the King- 
dom He spoke of. She has ceased to care for and to 
value her national character as a spiritual responsibil- 
ity, — a spiritual possibility. The jealousy of the Jew 
and the Apostle, of the Papist and the Puritan, for the 
Kingdom of God has become a strange thing to her. 
This of course has been due mainly to the Noncon- 
formist exodus. Let there be no glossing of the 
matter. The one sin of the Nonconformist against his 
national Church is that he leaves her. He brings it 
about that the Englishman is not born into one 
Church as he is born into one State. He is born into 
a competing complex of Kingdoms, into a civil war of 
religions ; and this calamity and misfortune he is asked 
to regard as a blessing. There are now five or six 
important and influential Nonconformist Churches in 
England. Each one began from small beginnings. 
Generally some single mind of strong individuality 

264 



A Church of England Approach 

has founded the new sect. He has seized upon 
some truth or aspect of the truth which the Church 
of his inheritance has obscured or neglected, and to 
get that truth regarded he has renounced his Mother 
Church. He has not noticed that this is a declension 
of ideal. To get one's truth accepted by one's 
Mother Church, that is the true prophet's mission. 
That the Church of a nation suffers terribly by losing 
out of her ranks just the strongest, most independent, 
most fearless minds, is of course always true. By 
this time the Nonconformists must have found this 
out by their own experience. These minds are 
intended to leaven the mass, not to leave it. No Non- 
conformist remains a Nonconformist. As soon as 
his Church is a generation old the great mass of the 
members belong to it because it is the Church of 
their inheritance. They belong as conformists. 
The founder has not evolved a new type of Christian 
impervious to the temptations of formality and tradi- 
tionalism. He has merely removed from his own 
Mother Church by his own impatience and self-will 
the purifying and strengthening power of his own 
spiritual insight and force. And when a Church is 
founded upon an aspect of truth neglected by its 
Mother Church its inevitable tendency is to magnify 
its own special truth and to forget as unimportant 
much of the creed and practice of the older Church. 
The body of Christ is dismembered. The various 
parts do not harmonise with each and keep each 
other in due control. This arm is abnormally mus- 
cular ; that eye is bright because its fellow is nearly 
blind ; there is no co-ordinating principle, no cohesion. 

265 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

The good which each member ought to get from the 
other members is lost by the common rejection of 
order and obedience. 

In this connection a word must be said on the 
modern ideal of freedom. A National Church is 
conceived of as bound and controlled and enslaved. 
Nonconformist Churches delight to describe them- 
selves as " free " Churches. The blessedness of free- 
dom is in giving, not in taking. The essence of the 
Kingdom as Jesus explains it is service. It seems 
a startlingly clear deduction from the Gospel story 
that the best thing to do when your Church is back- 
sliding is to remain in her and to suffer. It is your 
suffering that will help her. Service which is so faith- 
ful and passionate that it is in the world's eyes suffer- 
ing and sorrow and slavery is what Jesus demands 
from His disciples. Such faithful service goes always 
to the making of nations. An Englishman calls his 
army " the service." Can a Christian permit the 
suspicion of any lower ideal to disgrace his Church? 
Is a Christian's Church something which makes him 
comfortable, or is she something which sets him 
tasks? It is by suffering that we conquer. No law 
of the Kingdom is more fundamental. 

We are fond of speaking of the Elizabethan age 
as " spacious." It was spacious because the nation 
reached a conscious unity of feeling and thought, 
such as nations touch only now and then in their 
history. That " spaciousness " is a spiritual thing. 
It ought to be obvious in the Kingdom of Christ 
as soon as that Kingdom begins to be concrete in a 
nation, and rises above the individual and provincial 

266 



A Church of England Approach 

stage. It is not an accident that Elizabeth's reign 
produced the most Catholic-minded divine of the 
English Church. To consider for a moment the 
characteristics of Richard Hooker will be the best 
way of perceiving the virtue inherent in a national 
Church. Spiritual spaciousness is the quality of na- 
tional as opposed to departmental religion. What 
Shakespeare is among dramatists, Hooker is among 
theologians. It is impossible to class him as a high 
Churchman, a low Churchman, or a broad Church- 
man. He has the fullest sympathy with all three 
types of mind. He was trained in the Evangelical 
school, and his favourite author is Saint Augustine. 
But his aesthetic sensibilities are delicate and keen, 
and it never occurs to him to regard them as the 
enemies of his soul. Through them God's grace 
comes to him as abundantly and gloriously as 
through his reasoning and contemplative faculties. 
To call him a high Churchman would be misleading, 
but he is, nevertheless, the spiritual ancestor of the 
modern high Church school, and is in full spiritual 
sympathy with the great mystics — with Philo Ju- 
daeus, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Hugh of Saint 
Victor. He dares to quote Saint Thomas with respect, 
heedless of Protestant prejudice. But he has also 
his broad Church side. He has a noble faith in 
reason. The wholesome and sound side of the Re- 
naissance is beautifully expressed in him. He loves 
to quote from so-called profane authors, — from Ar- 
istotle and Cicero. And these sides of his genius do 
not clash. They are harmonised- They are there be- 
cause his nature is fuller and wider than is common ; 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

they are there unconsciously; just as unconsciously 
as Shakespeare's breadth of sympathy is present 
in his plays. Hooker's mind, therefore, gives no im- 
pression of indifference, of lazy tolerance of all creeds 
because none is held strongly. On the contrary, he is 
passionate on all his sides. If we sum him up under 
three aspects we have to admit that each with him is 
a joyful enthusiasm and all three are fused into one 
harmonious and homogeneous whole. It is this 
fusing together of different characteristics which in 
a national Church should come about at all times of 
deep national feeling. Such a fusion produces a new 
thing and a higher thing. When the spiritual tide of 
national life is low the national Church will find her 
schools of thought and temperament inclined to fall 
apart, and to split into " free " Churches, each trying 
to isolate itself and refusing to add to its own stature 
by the hearty vitality of its union with the whole body. 
It is impossible for a son of the Church of England to 
be complacent. What she is is so tormentingly below 
what she might be. But she aspires to be as full 
and passionate and strong as English human nature. 
She aspires to make out of English human nature 
the Kingdom of God which the Lord Jesus " orders " 
with His governance. That is her ancient historic 
mission. She desires the help of every Englishman 
to become what Englishmen, by help of God's grace, 

can make her. 

RONALD BAYNE. 



268 



THE CHURCH AS SEEN FROM 
OUTSIDE 

The Rev. PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT, M.A. 

Author of " Science and Religion " 

WHEN a man is asked to describe in any way 
the attitude of the English Church towards 
" modern thought," to suggest the prospects of 
reconciliation and of common work, or, from a purely 
external view, to show something of what may be 
contributed by the Church's particular effort to- 
ward the general advance, he is confronted by a 
special difficulty. This difficulty lies in the immense 
separation which seems to exist between the two 
terms of the suggested enquiry. It is almost as if 
they were what philosophers, I believe, call incom- 
mensurate realities. How, men ask, does the Church 
position, how does Church controversy or Church 
development come into contact at all with the great 
intellectual movements of the day? 1 What we are 
troubled with is not that our controversy with what 
is not Church thought is too acute, but that it 
is too confused; or rather that there is hardly the 

1 I have, at some sacrifice, refrained from all direct reference 
to the Church's share in the Social effort of practical reform, 
an effort which is only by abstraction separated from that of 
thought. 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

means for joining issue between the two claimants 
upon our attention. Somewhere in her " Letters/' 
Mrs. Holland, writing to a friend in the country, speaks 
of the Creed going up in the village church, while 
the men listen to the wind which roars outside. 1 The 
Belief and the wind are competitors, so to speak, 
upon our attention ; but they cannot be brought into 
a conflict of thought. The Creed and the modern 
movements, the Church and science — these indeed 
interrupt one another; they are rival applicants for 
the slender attention which we are able to give. We 
may yield our minds to one or the other, but we can 
hardly find within our consciousness a field for their 
debate. Rivals in an almost physical sense upon our 
attention, they are hardly controversialists, hardly 
opponents. The controversy, if it is a controversy 
at all, is confused, dim, lost in a mist wherein, so far 
from coming to terms, we hardly come to blows. 

And then further, there are great personal mis- 
understandings which extremely hamper personal 
efforts, not of conciliation only, but of opposition. 
Our friend who comes to us with an ache of doubt 
goes away unsatisfied, not so much because what we 
have said appears to him unreasonable, but because 
we have attributed to him a position which is not his 
own at all. Of Christians, many think this or that 
man to have gone much further in intellectual doubt 
than he actually has. It is sometimes the Christian 

1 " I knew you must be still in Church listening to the sermon 
and the roaring wind, — and I so often think of the chancel 
and of the poor men who look out of the window while the 
Belief is said." — Letter of Mary Sibylla Holland (Arnold), p. 5. 

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The Church as Seen from Outside 

who has faced the deep places of doubt, and imagines 
in the other man a degree of critical power and of 
experience, of which he is perfectly innocent. It is 
so far from being the case that the Christians have 
not faced difficulties, that they give the adversary 
credit for having been in deeper water than he really 
has. On the other hand, others are much further 
removed than is supposed from our position, and are 
offered arguments and helps which are not at all in 
place, which have no appeal, no kind of point for 
them because they belong to a region of debate 
which requires, for the entrance upon it, the answer- 
ing of many questions which are precisely the open 
questions of our interlocutors. 

I hint at, rather than attempt to describe, a con- 
dition of things which is surely familiar to a good 
many amongst us. There goes the Church argument 
up aloft, with its questions of higher and lower, and 
its much more serious question of critical study, chal- 
lenges of the authority of Christ, challenges of the 
authority of the Gospel to represent Christ, the chal- 
lenge of the Church to show herself a body which 
really holds to the Gospel. These questions and 
challenges pass over our heads, almost above the 
clouds for some of us. Meanwhile down below we 
are beset with questions of a totally different order, 
on a different plane, in a different sphere, questions 
almost material. May I be pardoned for recalling, 
not as an example of this but as a kind of image of it, 
what happens to the parish priest who is preparing a 
friend for confirmation. After many sessions of in- 
struction wherein the teacher has spent himself in the 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

simplest explanation, and his pupil remains silent, 
mysteriously attentive, the clergyman pauses, more 
than rhetorically, for a reply. " I have said by this time 
a great many things to you, and asked you a great many 
questions. Have you nothing to say to me? it is your 
turn to ask. Is there no question to which you desire 
an answer? " And then the man brightens up ; he has, 
indeed, a question. "Might I ask, sir, — I have often 
wondered — how much you paid for that clock?" 
That is not an example, but it is a sort of image of 
the complete remoteness of some acute and question- 
ing minds from the kind of reason which we imagine 
them to be seeking. I leave the suggestion of the 
state as a suggestion, and endeavour to press on to 
some proposals of steps towards a cure. 

The first need is one which I should describe, in 
the most general terms, as the need for a complete 
recognition of one another's honesty. I do not use 
the word " honesty " in any narrow sense. We are all, 
of course, indifferent honest, but intellectually there 
is the suspicion of parti pris. Do not harbour that 
suspicion, unless there are positive grounds for it. 
The Catholic, the high Churchman, has really his 
intellectual conscience, after all. The other man, who 
may call himself a materialist, has his immense desire 
for good. I am afraid I seem to repeat a merely 
familiar story, but the reality which I aim at is some- 
thing rather different from what I have seen described. 
I am not pleading merely for a conciliatory temper, 
or for giving another man credit for good intentions ; 
but for the remembrance, under the stress of the in- 

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The Church as Seen from Outside 

tellectual confusion of which I spoke, that possibly 
there is no confusion in the other man's own mind. 
One knows Dr. Liddon's old good-natured joke about 
the Westminster window and the fog on the Embank- 
ment. Well, what we now want is the thought, the 
guess, the hope that something else than fog inhabits 
the mind of the man who remains mysterious to us, 
whose window gives out only fumes our way. 

This divination of another man's clearness which is 
obscure to us seems to need two principal supports. 
First, we must remember that some men have a more 
acute critical power than others : that questions 
which seem settled for us are open questions to them, 
because in their minds they possess a finer instru- 
ment which finds crevices where we find none. 
There is a difference, then, in critical power ; some 
have it in a more acute state than we. But, on the 
other hand, the critical do well to remember that 
some men have larger data than they, a richer supply 
of substantial knowledge arising from experience. 
And although the acquisition of knowledge and its 
criticism are not powers which are alternatives in the 
mind, so that one is weak where the other is strong, 
yet it may often happen that the person of large and 
rich experience is not the most fully exercised in 
critical activities, and still more often that the man 
who is occupied in the fine division of the last rami- 
fications of new questions is the man who has no time 
for deepening the capacity of his soul and for filling 
it with larger measures of substantial gain. With all 
reserves, it remains true that some men have more 
acute critical powers than others, and some have 
18 273 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

larger stores to deal with. We could all of us point, 
in literature if not in life, to the men of keen intelli- 
gence who have misjudged, very gravely misjudged, 
their Christian neighbours, taking them for Obscur- 
antists, imagining them to be the enemies of advanc- 
ing knowledge, only because all the time their 
Christian neighbours had their minds fixed upon a 
range of spiritual reality which might well occupy 
all the powers which they possessed. 

A hopeful divination of other men's real thoughts, 
real clearness, would be a great gain; it would tend 
to reduce the confusion of our world of thought. 
And towards this there must be boldness in our own 
assertions, as well as hopefulness in hearing those of 
others. Apologetics must not become the effort to 
find another man to keep one in countenance in be- 
lieving. If, in believing, we are forced to be content 
with the co-existence, along with our belief, of our 
own ignorance, how much more may we be patient 
in face of the existence of ignorance in others, 
concerning those things which make our life. 

I allow myself to return with a certain freedom of 
digression to the question of data. We are losing 
the faculty of receiving as news, any piece of news. 
Positive information we have learned not to expect; 
Nil admirariy to be surprised at nothing, is the form 
of our mental experience. This effect is partly due 
to the fact that information reaches us in a continuous 
stream, a stream so rapid and so full that there is no 
point at which we catch the sense of freshness in our 
daily truth. Of this morning's paper a great deal 

274 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

was in yesterday's second edition, still more in yes- 
terday's evening paper; while the whole contents of 
that were in the telegraphs on the notice-board 
earlier in the day. There is a continual addition, but 
no pause and no burst. The news is like the spring 
in Africa, which never comes because it never quite 
stays away. All this gives substance to the habit 
by virtue of which we expect to have known already 
what we are being told ; and this in turn slides into 
the converse expectation that what we are told is in- 
deed what we knew before. The very notion of news, 
the power to receive substantial addition to knowl- 
edge, is weakened. 

This absence of the Athenian appetite is specially 
pronounced in the case of a man who is presented 
with spiritual news. When the very point to be con- 
veyed is that there is more to experience than he has 
yet experienced, he is sure to fit to the words offered 
him the meaning which is measured by his own life. 
Rhetoric has something to answer for in this matter, 
pious rhetoric, which uses concerning the common- 
places of regular conduct or sincere intention the 
august expressions first employed by prophets con- 
cerning those original experiences which constitute 
revelation. If Saint Paul tells of a third heaven, we use 
his word to point to a mood of happy confidence in 
the letter of Scripture. If Saint John says, " What we 
have seen, we declare," his words are used as descrip- 
tive of men who try to explain what they have gathered 
from Saint John's Epistle. And when the great words 
inspired by original experience are thus fitted with 
secondary and derivative meaning, there remains no 

275 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

language to express to a man any evidence of the 
nearness and beauty of God which he does not him- 
self share. There is nothing left but the poor elo- 
quence of emphasis, that most forcible-feeble of 
appeals : or silence. And silence is the more practical 
way. We are like a painter who has used his bright- 
est white before treating the high light of his compo- 
sition, and has nothing left for that but to scratch a 
hole through his canvas. 

But ought we not to be anxious to recover the 
common sense of the saints of earlier ages, so as to 
be able, like our predecessors, if not to share our 
neighbour's knowledge, at least to know that on this 
line or on that he knows more than we do? Failing 
this, we are left with so narrow a scheme of the scibile> 
so poverty-stricken a conception of being; with an 
outlook upon experience which, for all that may be 
said to us, remains, after all, only the reiterated report 
of our own inevitably one-sided life. We perform 
continually and on a large scale what I believe is 
called the fallacy of simplex enumeratio. This I know, 
and this, and this, and these are all ; or the rest at 
any rate is unknowable. 

And then there is the word " suggestive." This is 
answerable for almost as much mischief as the second- 
ary use of great statements. The word had and has 
its own appropriate use, but it has been used too 
freely. It became the fashion some years ago when 
an original man gave us of his best, to say that his 
book or sermon was " most suggestive." This ap- 
preciation, once aimed at a special quality in the 

276 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

speech and a special experience in the hearer, came 
in time to carry with it the flattering notion that, 
fine as were the speaker's thoughts, they were noth- 
ing compared to the bright trains of reflection initi- 
ated in the hearers' minds. It was a rich soil into 
which his plough was put ; a rare energy was set 
free by his timely but still humble stimulus. His 
function, the function of the most brilliant, was to in- 
terpret us to ourselves, to give words to the thoughts 
waiting in all of us for expression. Hence his ready 
appeal, our warm welcome. He was ourselves made 
audible ; he " voiced " — most horrible of all our 
newer words — our silent thought; his speech was 
" most suggestive." And indeed it would be rash to 
say that the most popular speakers are not those who 
tell what everybody knew already. But we must be 
on our guard against a certain simple conversion of 
propositions. It is true that when a man tells us 
what we knew, he speaks interestingly. Yet we 
must not draw from this the statement that the man 
who speaks interestingly never tells us what we did 
not know. 

But few will practically believe this, except here 
and there on points of material science. In a philo- 
sophical circle it would be impossible to get out a 
fresh thought, if the circle were visited by one. 
Every one would be so eager to label its expression 
with some old name: This is Berkeley, that is Kant; 
this is Dogmatism, Pragmatism, even Platonism. 
New words, if they could be found, would at once re- 
ceive an old connotation. Tell a man of a new spirit 
in music, he will interrupt you with " Ah ! the after- 

277 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

wave of Berlioz." Tell an Englishman, lost for six 
years on an uninhabited island, about the behaviour 
of radium salts, and before the word emanation is 
out of your mouth, he will cap you with the aerial 
diffusion of lead. I myself showed as something a 
little fresh, our new Capetown electric car, incan- 
descent within and without, and flashing violet above 
and below, to a raw native fresh from beyond the 
Kei, who had probably hardly seen a train until he 
embarked for Capetown at Indwe. But his philoso- 
phy, his mood was also, and quite sincerely, nil 
admirari. It was ''white man's ways," and he was 
not at all surprised. For him, as for the rest of us, 
every new thing seemed to have been seen before. 
And yet I doubt whether, like Mr. Henry James' 
person of " experience," he was " in the condition of 
feeling life in general so completely that you are 
well on your way to knowing any particular corner 
of it." 1 

I admit frankly that my last instance is unfavour- 
able to the notion that our disease of sameness is at 
all a new disease. Let it stand. We at any rate 
have the disease more acutely every day, if acuteness 
can be spoken of in such a connection. 

It is most oppressive in the field of religion, and 
there it oppresses the amiable as much as the trucu- 
lent. We are of the best intentions and wish to learn. 
But our bright intelligent way of taking each other's 
disclosures to point always to our own, quite possibly 

1 Partial Portraits, p. 389. 
278 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

more interesting, past, must sometimes, one imagines, 
be almost exasperating to the man who wants to tell 
us what we have already in terms assured him that 
we do not know. 

I plead rather earnestly for'the recognition, for the 
hopeful suspicion, that other men may have gone 
through more than we have. I plead for the truth of 
the Differences of Data; for a waiting, silent, pain- 
fully attentive attitude. Let us be more receptive, 
if haply some one has, after all, something to add to 
us in counsel. 

One's own brilliant critical faculty may resolve the 
world as it appears to oneself into matter and energy ; 
into lumps and shakes ; the tiniest lumps, and shakes 
rapid beyond imagination. If to another it appears 
to contain more, or to be contained by something 
which we cannot admit to consideration, let us not be 
over-ready to conclude that the difference of opinion 
is due to his blunted critical faculty alone. A wider 
experience, a mass of data less easily managed than 
our own, may also have contributed to this disagree- 
ment. 

II 

I HAVE allowed myself a long digression on this 
point of the credit for sincerity which must be ex- 
tended as far as possible to all our various witnesses. 

The second great need I should describe as the 
endeavour to distribute our enquiry, the enquiry of 
faith. The reason we make so very little progress in 

279 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

the actual work of controversy, the reason so many 
men, in despair of a real debate, go on with their own 
measure of knowledge and leave other people with 
their own doubts, is that what is in itself a long and 
intricate enquiry is put before us all together and 
confusedly. We should be much more likely to take 
an interest in the whole field if the field were mapped. 
We do not become all-round men by having ques- 
tions thrown in upon us at once from every side. 
Distinction is a step towards co-ordination. What 
may well at first sight appear an effort of depart- 
mental limitation will turn out to be the most profit- 
able effort towards a wider view of the whole field ; 
whereas that confused treatment which despises de- 
partmental limits results only in a man's almost total 
ignorance of the whole, and his far from moderate 
estimate of the small portion which he himself sur- 
veys. I wonder whether others feel with me about 
this, about the way in which questions which are real 
questions, are made unreal by being produced in the 
mid-course of an enquiry which, by its very exist- 
ence, presupposes that they have been answered one 
way or the other. 

One can understand the matter best when we take 
the physical side. How tiresome and useless it would 
be, how tiresome, in fact, it often is, if in the crisis of a 
physical discussion concerning the behaviour of a 
newly discovered metal, or the more subtle but still 
purely physical enquiry into the ultimate constitution 
of matter, one finds oneself confronted with questions 
strictly ontological. The discussion of atoms is often 

280 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

thus miserably confused. We get a mixture beween 
what is, after all, only the most minute measurable 
constituent of stuff, which cannot indeed be seen but 
which may be inferred mathematically by a consider- 
ation, for example, of the behaviour of light in certain 
circumstances, with what is quite another thing, 
namely the ideal, metaphysical, ultimate, or original 
constituent of matter. How tiresome would be the 
metaphysical critic who, in the midst of our consider- 
ation of some wonderful measurement of minutest 
bodies, should intrude the etymological criticism that 
whatever can be measured is ex hypothesi not an atom. 
Or to take the cruder case ; how troublesome if in 
the course of the re-examination of g by means of an 
improved Cavendish experiment, somebody were to 
raise the question of the existence of the external 
world. The judicious must surely answer that, while 
the existence of the external world may be in itself 
very doubtful, for physical experiment it must be 
regarded as settled. It has no place in an enquiry 
which assumes the affirmative answer to the wider 
metaphysical question. Well, is it not exactly the 
same thing when in the course of a discussion about 
the behaviour of the soul or of the reality of the 
Church you are confronted by the question put to us 
by dogmatic materialism? Undoubtedly many be- 
lievers are materialists about material things and 
even about what they call spiritual things, but this 
does not make the question less hopelessly incon- 
venient. It is obvious that no enquiry could go for- 
ward with any prospect of success where the different 
steps of doubt are not more clearly marked out. To 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

some of the questions which we meet, — Has Science 
disproved creation? or, Have new discoveries given 
fresh probability to the statement that light was 
called into being by God's will? — it is impossible to 
give any answer, because it is impossible to give 
any meaning. You may as well tell what is the 
Presbyterian view of radium salts, or whether Mr. 
Warner's success in Australia has strengthened the 
Church schools. 

Now I would endeavour to say with all emphasis 
that my idea is not that any of the questions debated 
amongst us are to be ruled out, either those which 
belong to concrete matters of occurrence or those, at 
the opposite pole, which belong to the most ultimate 
problems of being. We are not to put aside by a kind 
of anathema those, for example, who doubt the ex- 
istence of spirit. But we may properly invite them 
to consider that their presence cannot be practically 
useful in a mental assembly, whose business it is to 
consider the prospects of the spiritual life. Their 
question is a good and valid one. If it can be argued 
out with these who are interested in it so as to reach 
a negative reply, all trouble about Christianity would 
then be saved ; for there would be nothing upon which 
to found a debate. We could say, after the fashion 
of ministers in the French Chamber, 77 riy a pas de 
question religieuse. What is hopelessly unreasonable 
and unpractical is the sudden intrusion of these 
doubts at a later stage, when issue has already been 
joined upon questions which cannot arise until the 
materialistic superstition has been crushed. None of 

282 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

the questions are to be stifled, but we are to take 
things in order, and to admit to higher — or if so 
please you to lower — disputations those who have 
made up their minds about the earlier questions 
which are the wicket-gates to the several departments. 
There is no profit in discussing New Testament Law 
with those who do not acknowledge the authority of 
Jesus upon which all Christian Law rests. 

I have made these remarks by way of preparation 
— I believe a necessary preparation — for the en- 
deavour to answer the question which I suppose to 
be put to me — " What do you mean by the Church ? " 
If we are to bring Church ideas into any kind of 
scheme of general criticism, we must make up our 
minds about the links of connection. Quite at the 
first, perhaps, the work of thought will be to segre- 
gate these Church questions, to show them as lying 
far within a system which can only be entered by the 
affirmative answer, as I have repeatedly said, to 
certain early questions. Materialism, dogmatic 
accounts of the past of mankind, unmoral views of 
Society — it is absurd to bring any of these into 
direct collision with Church notions. The mere 
question of reality of the Church does not arise for 
those to whom these questions are still open ones. 
The first work may therefore be a work of segrega- 
tion ; but there will next be the work of making steps 
and links. We shall have to show how, where the 
successive affirmations of approach are possible, the 
questions which elicit them must be framed and 
ranged ; by what steps does the man win entrance 

283 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

to the region where Church questions are real ones. 
This task is not one for me to endeavour in such an 
essay as this. It is something to have pointed out 
its existence and its nature. 

In a simply logical world the result of such a 
method of approaching Church questions would be 
to narrow progressively the circle of men to whom 
we should appeal. To speak in the crude language 
of external facts, we should have first a band of men 
discussing the reality of the spirit. Supposing half 
of them deny it, are, in fact, materialists, or find that 
they cannot give with certainty an affirmative 
answer, that is to say are agnostics ; then the next 
step towards a Christian debate is left with a smaller 
public for its appeal. We go on with the other half. 
Among these men, believers about the soul, there 
will arise genuine questions about God's relationship 
to it. And eventually from point to point we pass to 
those who are confronted with the great and vital 
question whether as spiritual men, as believers in the 
prerogative of the spirit, they can accept the leader- 
ship and the mastery of Jesus Christ. 

Of course such a statement as this has to be made 
with great reserves. It is merely put forward as a 
crude suggestion of what actually goes on in much 
more subtle ways in the world of mind. In the con- 
crete, in the mixed man, in the experience moving at 
once in several planes which is life, we have no such 
strict separations. People do not first make up their 
minds that they are spiritualists, and then ask them- 
selves the questions of Theism. They do not first 
make up their minds about God, and then ask them- 

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The Church as Seen from Outside 

selves the question of Christianity. They find God 
in Christ, and finding God they find themselves. 
And the questions of materialistic philosophy are 
dissipated by the very fact that men find themselves 
in the position, in a spiritual position where they 
become unintelligible. Still when it comes to debate, 
it is after some such outline as this that the debate 
must proceed. And it is by link after link like this 
that the bond can be forged between the materialistic 
position and the position where Church questions 
are important. 

It is only by the avenue of the inward conscious- 
ness, in the resolved submission of the man, that we 
find our way to the Church. 

The Church itself is a reality of spirit, in spirit, 
evident to spirit, real in point of fact only for spirits, 
and those only in the particular condition of obedi- 
ence, of conversion. The body of men who are pos- 
sessed by this reality have contact in affairs with other 
men for whom the Church reality, the reality of souls 
submitted to Christ, is practically nonexistent. 

The Church idea, therefore, comes into conflict in 
the sphere of conduct with rival ideas, and its sub- 
jects appear as a band of men among the nations of 
the world. But it remains an ideal reality, and the 
questions which concern it can only be examined by 
those who by successive and ever more exacting 
affirmations have come in view of its true features. 



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Ideals of Science and Faith 



III 

Here, indeed, the notions falsely, as Maurice showed, 
called "popular" can help us very little. Few things 
probably are more simply defined than the high 
Church position as it appears to those who are not 
high Churchmen. To those who accept the unpopu- 
lar name, high Churchmanship, so far as it stands for 
what they accept, stands for an entire religious life, 
with all its complexity, variety, and depth. In a given 
space and time, the best that can be attempted is to 
select one or two points out of the whole position for 
fairly deliberate discussion. And further, when the 
occasion of the writing is an attempt at general un- 
derstanding, the points chosen should be points upon 
which misunderstanding is most general. These two 
points for us are probably, first, the question of the 
limits and constitution of the Church, and secondly 
the question of the value of outward things in religion. 
It is the first upon which I shall spend the rest of 
my space, the question of the limits and constitution 
of the Church. The task of defining a conception of 
these may perhaps best be approached by setting in 
order four possible types of conviction. 

(i) The first type of conviction is one which per- 
haps does not exist in many actual minds. It is that 
the Church, the outward body of believing Christians 
in which Revelation and Grace energise among men, 
is one which is not only quite strictly defined but also 
quite easily recognised, so that we can say without 

286 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

hesitation concerning a given man, if only he is accu- 
rately described, that he does or does not belong 
to the Church. In this view the membership in the 
Church which is necessary to salvation, with what- 
ever difficulties of particular evidence, may always 
be ascertained in principle by means of well-known 
tests. 

(2) The second type of conviction is that which 
regards external organisation, corporate life, as a 
positive hindrance to spiritual reality, which sees the 
very essence of personal reality in self-seclusion and 
in separation from others. While other things may 
have corporate existence, salvation must always be 
individual in such sense as to have no organisation in 
common with others, or at any rate as little as pos- 
sible. In this point of view organisation is only a 
concession to the necessities of the human side of 
the Church, and in no sense a part of its divine 
reality. 

(3) While the two former notions are perhaps not 
definitely held by many, there are many who would 
seek satisfaction in a third view; namely, that cor- 
porate activity is part, or at any rate a result of the 
genuine life of Grace, and is indeed its actual real- 
isation in the world we know; but that there is no 
particular form of organisation which is better than 
another. The various methods by which Christians 
have combined are to be judged as methods toward 
an end, namely the propagation of the Gospel, of 
which the organisation itself is not considered to 
form a part. They are the products of human wit; 
and therefore any particular form is valuable, like 

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Ideals of Science and Faith 

a society for the promotion of a special Christian 
purpose, so long as it is found not inconvenient; and 
it ought never to be clung to as in itself part of the 
end for which men are Christians. In general terms, 
corporate life is not an evil, but a good thing; yet 
it is a thing which in its form has not come to us 
by authority, is rather regulated with a view to the 
temporary fulfilment in a given place of a purpose 
which is in itself eternal, namely the salvation of all 
men. This theory is accepted, no doubt, with more 
or less of consciousness and of satisfaction by many 
men of good-will. 

(4) Fourthly, and in contrast to the last as well as 
to the other two, we attempt to describe the Catholic 
position. This finds, indeed, in the corporate life of 
the kingdom, as it is called in the New Testament, 
not a mere piece of machinery, but part of the es- 
sence of the Gospel. Those who hold it reject the 
idea that the Church is to be considered merely 
as an unessential method of getting out the essential 
message. They are so far dissatisfied with the state- 
ment that the Church exists in order to preach the 
Gospel, and find it so one-sided, that they would be 
almost willing in preference to accept the statement 
that the Gospel was and is preached in order to cre- 
ate the Church. The Church is the end, in this view, 
of our Lord's own ministry. He came that He might 
gather together men into one and make them into a 
Body. The object of all His ministry and passion 
is to get for Himself and make for Himself and to 
present to God a perfect Church. To gather to- 
gether into one those who had been scattered, who 

288 









The Church as Seen from Outside 

had been, not a people, but only so many persons. 
In broadest contrast, therefore, with the second view, 
it regards organisation and corporate life, the unity 
of growth, as constituting the very object of Christ's 
whole work, and of His Prayer "that they may be 
one." Further in contrast to the last-mentioned 
view (3), and in consequence of what has been 
already said, it is held by high Churchmen that 
there are definite and real principles of organisation 
which have come to us from Christ; that if it is un- 
true to describe corporate life as in contrast with, or 
hostile to, personal religion, it is also untrue, though 
in a less degree, to regard the dislocation of corpo- 
rate life as in its own nature an indifferent thing 
which no man need lament. Yet it refuses to com- 
mit itself to the view which we have put at the 
head (1). 

The principles of organisation which are in their 
own nature certain, are nevertheless known with 
various degrees of certainty and knowledge. 

The knowledge which is in its own nature sin- 
cere is carried out in action with various degrees of 
success. 

In such a view, therefore, however illogical it may 
appear to some, there is a possibility of actual grada- 
tion in men's Churchmanship, and also a possibility 
of actual doubt with regard to the degree to which 
they have attained true obedience to the divine plan. 
A man who should think in this manner would be 
slow, therefore — in many cases he would finally re- 
fuse — to define as out of the Church those who 
lack what he believes to be some of the elements of 
19 289 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

its true organisation. He does not readily consent to 
draw a line, however far afield, within which men 
who believe in Christ are, and beyond which they 
cease to be, Churchmen. Rather he is bound by 
the very nature of his doctrine concerning Church- 
manship, namely, that it is of the essence of the Gos- 
pel to believe profoundly that everybody is a true 
Churchman in the very same proportion as he is a 
true Christian. 

He will admit (and it is a thought which will bal- 
ance what has been last uttered), that the Christian 
life often grows in human souls in a one-sided and 
unbalanced way; that its progress, so far as that 
progress is discernible, is of necessity made, not in 
direct lines, but by steps which sway from side to side. 
Therefore he will recognise that in some men the 
work of Grace may proceed very far, though the 
thoughts of solidarity and corporate responsibility 
have not developed at all equally with those of the 
individual joy in Christ. Still, though in this way a 
man may be growing in intensity of Christian life 
without for the time growing in the sense of the 
Kingdom, yet taking things on the whole, we may 
say, and the high Churchman is bound to say, that 
the more truly a man is a Christian, the more con- 
sciously his Christianity is developed, and the further 
(taking things on the whole) it has gone, so much 
the more must he be in a true sense a Churchman. 
And seeing, as we do, the work of Grace operating 
in many quarters that lie apart from the historical 
organisation of the Church in its main stream, we are 

290 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

unable and we are unwilling — in fact we resolutely 
refuse — to draw the line among the followers of 
Christ at which the Church ceases. I emphasise the 
word " line." I do not say there are no limits. But 
the figure which seems most fit to suggest the 
Church's unity is not that of a disk bounded by a 
definite circumference, a disk within which all is safe 
and outside of which all is nought or uncertain. The 
figure which is felt to be more profitable is that of a 
radiating light, the limits of whose area, though they 
exist, cannot be discerned, and the form of whose 
extension is star-like. As the rays streaming from 
the centre penetrate into the darkness, so the Church 
penetrates into the world, and it is impossible to say 
where it leaves off. 

But it does not follow from this figure, nor does it 
follow from the thought which it is offered to illus- 
trate, that a high Churchman is indifferent to the less 
and the more of Churchmanship, or that he has no 
measure of them, no guidance for their recognition. 
The Church which cannot be defined like a geometri- 
cal figure by its limiting line, is defined, and with 
absolute certainty, by its blazing centre ; and to be a 
Churchman means to have recognised the paths along 
which the light streams from the centre; to have 
accepted as part of the Gospel, in the first place the 
principle of organisation or rather of organic life, and 
in the second place certain paths along which this 
organic life is constituted. Accordingly, though the 
high Churchman is able to be most liberal with 
regard to others, he is with regard to himself strict 
and unswerving, and is never satisfied with the degree 

291 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

of obedience he has attained. He seeks to realise to 
the fullest possible extent of activity and form, those 
principles which he already discerns, and he seeks to 
know more and more fully the root of those principles, 
the deeper first principles which underlie them. Con- 
sequently, though his position is in contrast with that 
of the man who thinks that a crude answer can always 
be given with regard to the limits of the Church, it is 
also greatly contrasted with the position of the man 
who thinks that the Church does not exist, and that 
there is no particular man or group of men nearer 
than any others are to the form in which God meant 
them to live. 

The most thorough-going view of the necessity of 
Church fidelity is capable of being also the most 
tolerant, or rather the most generous and hopeful. 
To believe that Churchmanship is essential to Chris- 
tianity is to discover Churchmanship in all Christians. 
But the " moderate " view, the opinion that Church- 
manship is a desirable adjunct or ornament to some- 
thing else which is essential Christianity, leaves a man 
free to deny any position in the Church to many 
whom he acknowledges to be Christians; to regard 
himself as possessing a dignity or advantage of 
station, a real gift from Christ which is not only 
denied to some others, but which they are not in 
need of. 

Certainly the thorough-going view may also be 
ungenerous. It is not enough to perceive the logical 
conversion of the proposition " only Churchmen are 
Christians " into " all Christians are Churchmen," 

292 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

though even this is more than some have perceived. 
Everything turns on the practical treatment of the 
converse thus arrived at. It becomes a warrant of 
hope and a command of generous sympathy and 
honour only when it is steadily held in the light of 
experience. We must be faithful to the positive 
method. That is, we must look at what men are, at 
what they believe and do ; we must recognise gladly 
the Christian state when we see it, and pray for the 
grace not to miss the discovery of it where it exists. 
Under this safeguard of watchfulness, our proposition 
" only Churchmen are Christians " will not lead to 
our denying the Christianity of those whose Church- 
manship is not evident. We shall, at all costs, recog- 
nise the discipleship to Christ, and believe that, 
however ill realised or unconscious it may be, the 
desire of Church life must be in those who desire to 
belong to Him. I say " desire," for it may be that 
there are some, even among believers, who are rather 
in the position of catechumens than of full disciples; 
who are on the way to belong to Christ, rather than 
travelling a path within His realm. 

And further, the positive method, the appeal to 
experience, to history, has a double application, just 
as our bare proposition has. We are not to reduce 
our list of Christians in order to preserve our defini- 
tion of Church essentials ; we are to keep in the safe 
way of experience, asking who actually is a Christian. 
But, on the other hand, we must not impoverish our 
conception of Churchmanship in order to make it 
match our own Christianity. We must ask what act- 
ually is and has been the way of the Church. Is not 

293 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

the Eucharist the glowing hearth of love from which 
all her devotion streams, unless, unawares, she has 
become something other than she was? And is not 
the Eucharist all this because it is the Lord's own 
Presence? Is not the " moderate " view of the great 
ordinance the one which really deserves the blame of 
showing a third thing between the Lord and the 
Soul? Is not the " extreme " view here also the safe 
view, the unifying view, which sees in His sacrament 
Christ, and Christ alone, and regards that which is 
Best as also Necessary? 

But I have gone too far. I refrain from suggesting 
the questions which naturally precede and follow this 
one ; questions of incorporation, ministry, order, con- 
ference, common action. This seems to me no place 
to ask what a synod is and who can sit in it. I desire 
not to obscure the main statement that Churchman- 
ship may be variable and yet real, that the Church's 
unity is vital and most definite, though it is not to be 
described as if by the lines of a geometrical figure, 
but determined by the continuity of life. So far as 
in this way one can suggest anything, this seems to 
me to suggest the high Churchman's thought about 
the Church; its ultimate and absolute necessity, its 
essential and Divine character, its real and definite 
existence; and yet at the same time the difficulty 
which must be ours with regard to its limits. And 
along with this prudent, modest, and liberal attitude 
concerning others, what I have said suggests, I hope, 
the reality of the high Churchman's unflinching 
confidence in the principles of organisation which 
have come down to us from the great past, and his 

294 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

constant zeal, just so far as he is a real high Church- 
man, to know more accurately and to follow more 
faithfully, the lines of organic life which he believes 
to be the lines of obedience. 

It is indeed in this word " obedience " that the 
whole secret lies. For here is our answer to those 
who, putting aside all the cheap and long-discredited 
objections to corporate life which were formerly 
thought valuable, would urge upon us, that if the 
Church is indeed a vital unity, if its laws are laws 
of life, they may be trusted to take care of them- 
selves; that the Church, if it is indeed part of the 
work of Grace to make a body, is bound to be such 
a body ; and that therefore there is no call for any 
given man to take sides upon the matter, to stand 
for the principles of organisation ; that it is bound 
to assert itself without him ; that there is no need 
to take pains about the discernment of the princi- 
ples of growth which are quite certain to vindicate 
themselves by their own power of life ; that what 
we ought to desire is to live the Christian life within 
ourselves ; its form and relations will take care of 
themselves. Indeed there is much truth in this, 
so much truth that all our care and thought, all 
our study of the past, all our anxiety about Sacra- 
ments and Orders and unity of action, are wholly 
and finally worthless, unless at the ground and root 
of them there is the care to increase in the essential 
life and joy of God's presence. But if this be there, 
then it does not follow that the other care is unnec- 
essary; for the life which we are speaking of is an 
intellectual life. 295 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

It constitutes itself, it reasserts itself against death, 
it maintains itself, not by a mechanical necessity, not 
by a quasi-chemical metabolism of nutrition, but by 
a process of souls. The image from life misleads 
us if we conclude from it that because the plant 
grows without thinking, therefore the anti-typal plant, 
the Church, will grow without thinking also ; that 
because the grub is metamorphosed into the fly with- 
out prayer, without zeal, without love, without inten- 
tion, therefore the life of which it is the image, the 
new creation in mankind, will bring itself to pass 
without thought. In order to obtain a just parallel 
to a Church growing without thought and zeal we 
should need a tree growing without sap and fibre, 
a plant nourished without leaves or chlorophyll, an 
animal developed without food, without blood. For 
indeed the blood, the food, the sap, the growth- 
process of a body which is a body of salvation is 
constituted in thought, in spiritual activity, in love 
and penitence. Its growth is a growth by intention, 
the maintenance of its life is the maintenance of its 
purpose. It is a new creation in freedom, growing 
by the enlistment and redemption of the fallen will, 
growing as the will once fallen is lifted up into a 
genuine and growingly conscious share in the Di- 
vine purpose. The Fall itself is the abandonment 
of thought for impulse. The fault which had to 
be remedied was precisely this slothful yielding to 
laws of growth which realise themselves. The new 
life is a life in the broadest sense intellectual; it 
is a life of light. And here is our answer to those 
who ask us why, if Churchmanship is indeed part 

296 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

of the life of Grace, we do not trust blind Grace 
to bring forth true Churchmanship. Our answer is 
that the labour of knowledge, the effort of Conser- 
vatism, the energy (even the strife) of adherence, 
to the principles we discern, the long toil of obedi- 
ence, is the very thing, is the very life we trust, 
but which finds itself in knowledge and struggle, in 
choice, that there is no virtue which is to remain 
blind, no Grace which is not always conquering 
darkness, that the Life is the Light of men. And 
if there be any person strictly in contrast with the 
high Churchman I have sketched, it is precisely the 
man who thinks that no care of his is called for in 
order that the form may be true, who thinks that 
the energy bestowed upon a genuine representation 
on earth of the law of the Kingdom is an energy 
which ought to have been spared for the more vital 
cause, the more intimate and separate concerns of 
the soul in its solitude before God. The high 
Churchman recognises that the Kingdom is the first 
word of the Gospel ; that the Lord in the announce- 
ment of His purpose, in the announcement of His 
presence, made mention first of a Kingdom, even 
before he named the King, and made clear at the 
same time that it was a Kingdom of souls, a King- 
dom of thought and Love, a Kingdom whose laws 
had their authority indeed from above, but their 
sanction and the means of their fulfilment in the 
willing action of obedient hearts. 



297 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

The above may seem to many with whom I am 
really in full sympathy but a very poor, meagre, and 
vague account of the great possession we share. It 
means something not vague to me, and I am sure 
that the thing which these words point to is not 
poor and slight, but the one great thing under 
Heaven which has its roots in Heaven itself. 

The comprehension towards which I desire to lift 
my wishes and thoughts is one not only different from 
certain practical schemes of compromise but related 
to them as an opposite. The so-called Church unity 
whose basis is of the earth, earthy, has often been 
offered and in many contrasted forms to the accept- 
ance of Christians wearied and weakened by debate. 
It almost always proves to be a unity of outward 
form or at most of merely intellectual consistency. 
When we meet the proposal that Church people 
should have the widest liberty in belief and dis- 
belief, so long as they conform with exactness to 
a state-regulated ceremonial, we meet an old friend, 
or rather an old enemy, in almost the old form. 
Rigidity of legal uniformity has very often gone 
along with indifference about the heart of truth. 
Erastianism and Latitudinarianism are old allies. 
And even when the exaggerated claim of State or 
National Control was made in Catholic accents, it 
was not always untouched by that fault from which 
Catholics think themselves most of all likely to be 
free. The extremes of doubt and dogma meet, and 
meet sometimes in one man. The Court which sup- 
ported Laud, supported Hobbes as well, and patron- 
ised Chillingworth. The unity of externalism is not 

298 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

simply a poor substitute, it is the thing most incom- 
patible with deep orthodoxy and the vital inter- 
connection of reason, love, and will in a single effort. 
The day we long for is not a day in which the 
Church of England will move grandly forward with 
a Prayerbook perfectly exhibited through the uni- 
form ministry of men holding opposite beliefs ; but 
a day, the day, when the light shall shine so full in 
her, and the vital connection of her heart and move- 
ments be so sure and so known, that there shall 
be room in her and room claimed for every man who 
really confesses that JESUS is LORD, God mani- 
fest in the flesh, — room for all those, and room for 
no one else. 

I say " room claimed " by those for whom the 
room is ready. And, in strictness remember, this will 
mean that no one will suppose himself to be a Chris- 
tian who does not also believe himself to be a Church- 
man, and endeavour to realise his Churchmanship in 
love and obedience. 

Such a Church, true to itself in inmost truth, will 
be far from thinking the furthest offsets of external 
action insignificant. She will insist, on the contrary, 
that they shall become significant. Knowing the 
fountain-head of her own waters, she will endeavour 
that the streams may run clear, from unexpressible 
love to ordered statement; from statement to cere- 
monial, vital and yet various, because enlisting the 
various temperaments which share the one love; 
from worship to social endeavour, minute in intimacy, 
ever broader in extension ; to expression in many 

299 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

unforeseen activities which shall be church activities, 
because they are spiritual, but not spiritual because 
they despise the body. Such a Church, true to her- 
self, intolerant, as every living thing must be by the 
terms of the charter of life, of all that is contrary to 
her life, will yet be the Church which alone can serve 
the men who, at a given hour, still seek and have not 
found the faith in which she rests and moves. 



IV 

MUCH must be added to this paper before it could 
safely, however slightly, represent the Church idea 
upon more than one side. I may be expected to tell 
what, in my own belief, are the main and necessary 
elements of organisation; what is finally and always 
characteristic of the Church; what at the lowest 
reckoning a Christian is ; at what point, for practical 
purposes, fellowship is effectual. But I should depart 
from my plan if I discussed these here. Silence 
about them is dictated not by a conciliatory prudence, 
or even alone by the modesty of little knowledge, but 
by the occasion and the method of the present paper. 
For this is not a proposal for reform or for co-opera- 
tion, nor is it a discourse intended to expose the 
strength of their position to high Churchmen or to 
make those men high Churchmen who are not that 
now. It aims only at removing some quite prelimi- 
nary objections to considering the Church system and 
idea as rational at all ; and it stops very far short of 
any description of the Church's life as it is. 

300 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

At present a good deal has been done to explain 
and recommend the ideals and the nature and work of 
science to those Churchmen who are not scientific. 
In such work we do not show positively the features, 
for example, of biological investigation or of its sub- 
ject-matter. The end is attained if it is shown that 
Biology is not an artificial system remote from nature, 
or in method remote from other parts of science, or 
fanciful, or given up to inconsequent speculation. 

The same restriction of effort is proper when 
we speak of the Church and the Church idea to any 
who have thought of the first as a conventional as- 
sociation, or of the other as an eccentric survival in 
thought only possible for those who exile them- 
selves from modern studies. It would be an " extrav- 
agance," a departure from method — and I was 
guilty for a moment of such an extravagance — to 
introduce any one or two of the positive facts the im- 
portance of which taken together I have endeavoured 
to point out. 

The main thing needed in order that the Church 
may come within the view of many men is to assert 
afresh her spiritual character. This which seems to 
segregate her really brings her near. Not all men have 
cathedral stalls, but all men have souls. It is when 
the Church seems to take rank with the kingdoms of 
the world or the associations for secular study that 
she becomes unintelligible, impossible, at least quite 
unmanageable for thought. To be removed is in 
this case to draw near, to be lifted up is to be homely. 

But she is a mystic, not a sorcerer ; and mystics are, 
301 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

for ordinary purposes, quite ordinary. That is why, 
like Gilliatt in " Les Travailleurs de la Mer" the 
Church is so disappointing in the matter of miracles, 
social or otherwise; miracles, such as the critics 
expect. " Faire des miracles 6tait une chose a 
laquelle il se refusait obstin^ment, ce qui est ridicule 
a un sorcier. Ne soyez pas sorcier, mais si vous 
l'etes, faites votre metier." 

The Church is neither a rival in the market, nor a 
sorcerer in our town, something strange but earthy. 
The Church is mankind spiritualised, re-created ; and 
this very sublimeness, I said, makes her ordinary and 
near. 

The Irish missionaries planted themselves in isles 
to be near all Britain. It is the castle frowning 
among us which is isolated. The island is our neigh- 
bour by virtue of the sea, that wonderful sea which 
unites because it divides, and is an image of the 
unifying virtue of a true distinction. 

The being of the Church, we have to repeat, is in 
the minds and for the minds of men ; but we must 
give to every term of this expression its widest mean- 
ing. It is as a development of a certain condition 
of the consciousness that the Church takes a place 
among cognisable facts. 

The authority of the Church is an authority for 
brethren, for believers, about belief, in belief, an au- 
thority to help prayer and love. It is the authority 
which one exercises toward the other, which all ex- 
ercise for each, when two or three are gathered to- 
gether, when they agree touching anything they shall 
ask. It is the authority which the mother possesses 

302 



The Church as Seen from Outside 

for the child, when they worship together, the child 
kneeling toward his mother, his face veiled in her 
robe, and Christ between them. It is an authority 
of consent but not of self-directed consent, for the 
leadership is an appointed one. 

The man who from outside challenges this authority 
is like one who should intrude upon the mutual con- 
fidence of friends. But the very thing which makes 
interference ludicrous makes understanding possible. 
It is when the Church confronts men as a power con- 
ventionally or nationally or financially denned that she 
becomes an unintelligible mystery. When she ap- 
pears not simply as the shrine of an idea which might 
have remained without a shrine, but as life with the 
form which belongs to life, it is possible for her to be 
contemplated by men who are for the time not of 
her, and to bring the truth nearer to them. 

PHILIP NAPIER WAGGETT. 



303 



A CHURCH OF ROME APPROACH 

WILFRID WARD, B.A. 

Author of" Witnesses to the Unseen" etc. 

I REGARD the word " science " in the title of this 
work as comprehending historical and biblical 
criticism, as well as the physical sciences, and I 
propose, in response to the invitation of the Editor, 
to answer three questions : — 

(i) Why, in endeavouring to formulate a Weltan- 
schauung which takes cognisance at once of the trend 
and achievements of science, and of the truths of 
religion, do I consider that the problem should be 
approached, in the first instance, from the standpoint 
of religious faith, rather than from that of science? 

(2) Why do I consider that the constitution of 
the Roman Catholic Church is suited, ideally, for the 
necessary mental adjustments, apart from the consid- 
eration of certain practical difficulties which make 
the general assimilation of new truths slower among 
Catholics than in other religious bodies? 

(3) How do I regard the problem practically hie 
et nunc, account being taken of these difficulties? 

I propose to give my answers briefly, and on those 
broad lines which alone the space placed at my dis- 
posal allows. 

(1) In answering the first question, I go upon the 
general principles which we inherit, in different forms, 

3°4 



A Church of Rome Approach 

from Burke, from Butler, from Coleridge, from Car- 
dinal Newman, — that we have, in dealing with such 
questions as those before us, to ascertain the order 
of Nature in the human mind, and to act on it. 

The true province of science, in relation to human 
experience as a whole, is not to give us an entirely- 
new standpoint which supersedes the old, any more 
than we wear spectacles to take the place of eyes. 
It is, on the contrary, to extend or correct the defec- 
tive or inaccurate spontaneous declarations of ex- 
perience, which science presupposes as having their 
root in truth. Experience, though radically trust- 
worthy, is seldom long content with its own narrow 
limits. It issues spontaneously, in deductions from 
the data of experience, or speculations on their im- 
plications, which are partly true, partly illusive con- 
jecture. Science corrects illusions, and gradually 
substitutes the true rational developments of expe- 
rience for its inaccurate and fanciful developments. 
But in doing so it assumes the truth of the primary 
data of experience. 

I assume all forms of religion to present normally 
a combination, in very various proportions, of human 
speculation and tradition, with one aspect of experi- 
ence, — namely, the consciousness of responsibility 
contained in conscience, and the sense it conveys of 
dependence on a higher Power. Speculation and 
legend are interwoven with those parts of religious 
experience which are the true life of religion. And 
in this connection, as in the case of other aspects of 
experience which have become blended with fanciful 
conjecture, the lawful function of science is, I main- 
20 3°5 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

tain, not, in the first instance, to make a clean sweep 
of existing beliefs, but to sift critically their various 
ingredients. The work of science is not to destroy 
the existing religion, or to offer us an entirely new 
mental synthesis, but gradually to correct the inci- 
dental extravagances of prescientific speculation on 
the supernatural, and to prune its overgrowths. One 
cannot destroy religion provisionally. Religion, once 
destroyed, will not be effectually replaced. It is too 
intimately connected with the gradual development 
of mind and soul to be given effectually from out- 
side in mature life. A new scientifico-religious creed 
would not easily take root, for the religious element 
in it would be largely destitute of its normal evidence. 
Nay, more, the power of inward growth in the reli- 
gion early implanted, its power of holding and 
moulding the mind, may be easily destroyed by the 
rough handling even of its mental setting, — of the 
incidental legends and speculations which it contains. 
It is a case of the wheat and the tares over again. 
Some undisturbed growth, some permission of super- 
stitious accretion is necessary, at all events under our 
present conditions, in order that what is normal and 
true in religion may be firmly grasped. With some 
minds, indeed, just as inevitable limitation prevents 
any one from being a specialist in many branches, 
so a certain congenital weakness makes a grasp of 
the scientific standpoint incompatible with a grasp 
of religious truth, and such weakness must be recog- 
nised and allowed for in individual cases. For Silas 
Marner to doubt that the lots decided aright was to 
disbelieve in God. It is probable that had any one 

306 



A Church of Rome Approach 

succeeded in persuading the simple Lama, in Mr. 
Kipling's Kim } that his quest for the river of heal- 
ing which sprang up where the Saviour shot his 
arrow was a fool's errand, that his conviction that 
Kim had been providentially sent to him was credu- 
lity of the deepest dye, that many other sustaining 
beliefs which guided his course in life were equally 
unreliable, he would eventually have gone mad with 
sorrow. We can hardly conceive his faith in Provi- 
dence surviving the destruction of a setting which 
had become so elaborately and closely twined around 
it. His religious faith could not have stood the 
truths of even a very simple science. Yet the touch- 
ing picture before us is that of a really " holy one," as 
he was regarded by the people, whose faith in guid- 
ance from on high, and in the worth of righteousness, 
had in it elements that were trustworthy as they were 
deep, and would make him capable of enduring death 
for the True and the Just. 

Such cases must be in our minds if we would see 
all aspects of the practical problem before us, because 
what is wholly true of a small minority of simple- 
minded mystics, is partly true of a large majority of 
believers. The point will come at which the effect 
on the imagination of a new setting, if it is offered 
suddenly and wholesale, will destroy a true faith. 
For man does not live by reason alone. But the 
motive which has prompted the present volume re- 
minds us that such incompatibility between religious 
and scientific culture does not represent the normal 
attitude of the most thoughtful at present. On the 
contrary, it is the union of faith with superstition 

307 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

— the divorce of faith from science — which is apt 
to give, in their eyes, a certain plausibility to the 
agnostic contention that religion is incredible as 
being naturally the enemy of a science which is unde- 
niable, and that a reconciliation between the two is 
impossible. 

The question before us is, then, how in one indi- 
vidual to combine a grasp of the truths of religion 
with an acceptance of the general outlook revealed 
by the secular sciences; and I maintain, as I have 
already said, that the normal course of life and of 
Nature is, in dealing with this problem, our best 
guide. A child learns the broad principles of right 
and wrong; it learns to trust its parents, to trust the 
information of its senses, which, as time goes on, 
gradually correct and supplement each other; to 
believe the broad simple views of history, the incul- 
cation of which experience shows to be the only way 
of teaching its first lessons. There are certain prac- 
tical correlatives to the child's apprehension of these 
early lessons which are not true. Confidence in 
parents, so desirable and reasonable a temper, trans- 
lates itself into a practical belief in their infallibility. 
The vivid apprehension of the pictures or lessons 
through which it learns its first lessons of history 
often translates itself into a belief in the literal exact- 
ness of what are really inexact symbols, or broad 
views which need much qualification to make them 
accurate. The judgments of the home circle are 
again held as a final standard. To correct in due 
course these inaccurate overgrowths of valuable be- 
liefs, Nature does not recommend a clean sweep of 

308 



A Church of Rome Approach 

early lessons, — the presentment of a brand-new creed 
of science and enlightenment, which begins by say- 
ing, " what you have learnt is false ; I will teach you 
a new and better way." On the contrary, a wise 
teacher gradually, and in proportion as the mind is 
ripe for such distinctions, points out the difference 
between the truths and their exaggerations. Parents 
are, he explains for the practical purposes of a 
child's daily guidance, generally trustworthy; but 
they are not infallible. The judgments of the home 
circle give, in most cases, a definite and more or less 
coherent point of departure for freer criticism, — and 
one must have some fairly coherent standpoint to 
begin with, at the lowest, as an exercise ground for 
the intellect. The early lessons in history, and the 
pictures used to illustrate them do give broad out- 
lines of true historical events of which the details are 
unknown or known to be far more complex than can 
be conveyed in the form of their first presentment. 
The division of historical characters into good and 
bad (to which a child tends with instinctive delight) 
has its meaning and represents the outlines of a gen- 
eral view. Further knowledge is introduced gradu- 
ally as a corrective. It is not presented as something 
which ought to displace bodily and supersede the 
whole existing mental furniture. The first educative 
ideas are regarded as containing in a not wholly 
accurate form fundamental principles to shake which 
would be to destroy the mind's power of consistent 
apprehension. 

And so, too (I would maintain), the results of his- 
torical criticism and of the physical sciences should 

3°9 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

be gradually superimposed on the basis of the exist- 
ing religion, that religion being prior to these results, 
and the necessary displacements in its superstructure 
being gradual, and effected with due regard for the 
constitution of the human mind. For the faculty of 
religious belief (if such a metaphorical expression be 
lawful) may be lost, if its nature is disregarded and 
its laws are violated. 

If this is generally true, even with those religions 
in which the fanciful element is large, and the ethical 
element far from perfect, still more true is it with any 
form of Christianity, in which the ethical element is 
so predominant and is in itself noble and pure. If, 
for example, Scripture is at one stage of mental 
development believed as literally true in all details, 
because it is the word of God, a wise upholder of the 
reconciliation of science and faith should not, on the 
principles I am upholding, make a clean sweep of 
such a belief, but, presupposing the belief and its 
fundamental truth, should distinguish that truth 
from its inaccurate interpretation or application. 
He should show that the human instruments of a 
divine message wrote with the culture of their time, 
which included ignorance or error in matters now 
explored by science and critical history, and that 
God's teaching is enshrined in documents in which 
that culture is inevitably to be found. That culture 
may include inaccuracy in secular science without 
prejudice to the fact of a Divine message. 

(2) I claim for the Roman Catholic Church that 
in its general line of action it has practically, in the 
long run, adopted this modus opera?idi in its own life, 

310 



A Church of Rome Approach 

and in the gradual development of its constitution as 
an ecclesiastical polity. 

This will be more evident if we first note the 
change which the last fifty years have brought in 
the statement of the problem before us. Speaking 
roughly, it is this, — that fifty years ago the theo- 
logians were apt, in popular discussion, to present a 
large intellectual structure, dealing in point of fact 
with matters within the cognisance of physical science 
and history, as well as of theology proper. This 
structure had the prescriptive right of possession, 
as comprising the " orthodox " theological position. 
The orthodoxy of new hypotheses, in science or his- 
tory, was tested by their consistency with it. Thus 
geologists were adjudged heterodox if they differed 
from the traditional view (long inferred from the 
Bible) as to the antiquity of man; evolutionists 
were condemned because they differed from the gen- 
erally received account of a series of special crea- 
tions, and so forth. The modus agendi applied in 
the Galileo case was still in force, and theories were 
condemned on the ground that they contradicted 
the generally accepted view as to what Scripture 
vouched for. 

This method now no longer prevails even in popu- 
lar discussion. Scientific and critical research has, 
at all events, shown beyond question that much of 
the traditional " theological " structure will not stand. 
The antiquity of man, once deduced from Scripture, 
is no more regarded as necessary to orthodoxy than 
the Ptolemaic interpretation of the book of Joshua. 
But to the agnostic tendency, to which this demon- 

311 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

stration at first led, has succeeded the view that the 
structure of the current " theology " (using the word 
in the large sense above indicated) is one the 
strength and importance of whose parts are very 
various ; that the dilemma of all or none was false ; 
that the agnostic conclusion was as unproven as the 
ultra-conservative assumption had been unwarranted; 
that the " theological " structure was the outcome of 
the development of Christian thought in prescientific 
days, including many overgrowths as well as the 
growing vital parts; that there is no short cut to 
the essence of Christianity; that man cannot ade- 
quately isolate, comprehend, or define the divine 
truth presented by dogmatic propositions ; but that 
a truer (though never an exact) representation of 
the truths committed to the guardianship of theol- 
ogy? as embodied in an intellectual setting which 
takes account of modern science, will be obtained 
by the process of mutual correction in which the 
body of scientific and critical speculation — largely 
coloured as it is by the anti-Christian bias so often 
influencing its framers — engages in reciprocal criti- 
cism with the " theology" in possession, which is at 
present mingled with prescientific and inaccurate 
conjecture. Any large or free presentment of the 
scientific and critical outlook will include much over 
and above ascertained fact, just as the prescientific 
statement of " theology " involved inaccurate over- 
growths in matters which have only in later times 
been sifted by scientific investigation and historical 
criticism. A certain antagonism then between the 
representatives of science and of theology, an atti- 

312 



A Church of Rome Approach 

tude of mutual criticism, would seem to be the 
indispensable preparation for any satisfactory assimi- 
lation. Only thus shall we approach that elimina- 
tion of unproved excesses on either side which, so 
long as they stand, make the two systems, of science 
and " theology," irreconcilable. 

I maintain that this process of antagonism and sub- 
sequent partial assimilation between the conclusions 
of the human reason, freely energising, and the cur- 
rent presentment of the truths of faith, which we now 
see to be essential to theological precision in view of 
the advance of human thought and of secular knowl- 
edge, has in fact been unconsciously taking place 
from the first in the Catholic Church in the develop- 
ment of its " theology." Such a contention does not 
exclude the possibility of injustice and excess on the 
part of individuals in authority in their initial antag- 
onism to the novelties advanced in the name of 
" reason ; " nor does it involve a subsequent assimila- 
tion which is either rapid or complete. But although 
the results visibly attained may be only approximate, 
we may see in the representation within the Church 
of all the interests concerned, and their mutual inter- 
action, the Providential means of at once preserving 
the essence of revelation and admitting the obviously 
just demands of advancing human thought. 

And as the story of organic development is said to 
be, broadly speaking, similar to the story of the grow- 
ing fcetus, so the history of the Church would seem 
to mark out the philosophy of her action in respect 
of her individual members. The story of the Church 
to which the faith was committed at Pentecost, and to 

3 1 3 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

whose members science and philosophy have gradu- 
ally imparted new successive phases of secular culture, 

— from the days of the Alexandrian School to those 
of the Aristotelian renaissance of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, — is broadly similar to the story of the growing 
youth. The Church has followed the path of Nature. 
It received a revelation at the outset, — a moral ideal, 
together with sanctions and beliefs which gave men 
the power of translating it into action. On that reve- 
lation its members, from an early period, made specu- 
lations, and from it they made deductions, both 
speculations and deductions including a large ele- 
ment of the fanciful. They have gradually been 
pruned within the Church in accordance with the 
lessons taught by the advance of the human intellect 
in accuracy of reasoning; yet the operation of prun- 
ing has been done with great caution lest Divine 
Truth should be mutilated in the process of cutting 
off superstitious accretions. The well-known instance 
of the early Gnostic controversy was, as it were, a 
rehearsal for this mode of action so often repeated 
within the Christian Church. She rehearsed in that 
instance, in relation to philosophical speculation, the 
course which she must now inevitably take in rela- 
tion to the positive sciences. The Hellenism of the 
Gnostics was, in spite of its elements of genuine philo- 
sophical speculation, largely an indulgence in fancy. 
And it involved the rejection of the Old Testament, 

— an essential element in the groundwork of Chris- 
tian development. It was opposed by St. Irenaeus 
on behalf of the Church, and his ever-memorable 
passage on the vanity of human speculation on mat- 

3M 



A Church of Rome Approach 

ters of which we can know nothing, may be regarded 
as a motto representing the wisdom of the Christian 
philosophy of Faith. But while the " acute secularis- 
ing " of Christianity and its sudden Hellenising, to use 
Harnack's phrases, was opposed by the Church, the 
assimilative genius of Catholicism became gradually 
apparent in this very matter. Harnack has not hesi- 
tated to say that in Catholic theology, as subsequently 
developed, "Gnosticism obtained half a victory," 1 
in so far, he explains, as Gnosticism was Hellenism. 
Cardinal Newman, as I have elsewhere pointed out, 
takes a very similar view of this episode in Christian 
history. The condition was that the assimilation was 
gradual and critical. The Gnostic rejection of the 
Old Testament, the very basis of Christian develop- 
ment, was set aside; the more fanciful theories were 
rejected. The essential genius of Catholicism and 
the essence of the revelation were preserved. Given 
this condition, the gradual adoption of the Hellenic 
superstructure in its explication was admissible. 

The combination of exclusiveness, whereby the 
essential principles and beliefs of the primitive reve- 
lation were preserved, and assimilative power whereby, 
once this was assured, the more serious achievements 
of the human reason and the more important factors 
of a newer culture could be admitted, has, then, I 
would maintain, characterised the Church from the 
first days of her intellectual life. She began as a 
child. The revelation was imparted to uneducated 
fishermen. Deep truths of vital importance to all, 
cultured and uncultured, were given her once for all, 
1 See Harnack's History of Dogma, I. 227. 
315 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

at a stage prior to that at which the Christian philo- 
sophical schools came into existence. The infantine 
fancies or boyish speculations which arose had to be 
gradually eliminated, and to give place to the grave 
philosophy and fuller knowledge of fact contributed 
by the great Christian thinkers and the serious ex- 
ponents of secular science. The division of parts in 
the polity which was gradually evolved, — a division 
which is now so acutely needed when the world 
known to history and to science is found to be sus- 
ceptible of a knowledge so much more wide and 
accurate than was once imagined to be possible, — 
was visible already in the early centuries ; — the divi- 
sion (I mean) between the representatives of the 
devotional life, and the representatives of research, 
reflection, and speculation on the intellectual basis of 
that life. And the Ruling Power which the Church, 
as a world-wide society, needed, embodied also the 
third element in its constitution, namely, the official 
and divinely appointed guardians of the depositum 
fidei y whose work it was to protect and supervise 
both interests, — to preserve the faith on which de- 
votion rested, to resist the encroachments of the 
speculative intellect, and yet not to bar out assured 
intellectual truth, which it behooved the Society to 
assimilate, lest Christianity should be identified with 
superstition and become inaccessible to the educated. 
(3) All this may appear to be highly theoretical. 
The Church of Rome, it may be urged, has been 
historically the foe to science and to freedom of in- 
tellect. In proportion as the distinctive features of 
" Romanism " have become clearly differentiated in 

316 



A Church of Rome Approach 

course of Church history, the intolerant and perse- 
cuting spirit has increased. The Roman authorities 
have ever been notorious for condemnation — when 
have they done anything in the direction of assimi- 
lation? Even admitting what has been said as a 
theory, how can it be regarded as true to fact? 

To this I reply, 

(V) That just as a contest or rivalry, physical, 
political, financial, between a man of principle and a 
man without principle, is often an unequal one, — for 
the latter may in a hundred ways hit below the belt, 
— so there is a sense in which the Church must be, 
not indeed a foe to, but a drag on, scientific advance. 
The man without a conscience has simply to think 
of the best road to success. The other must ask 
at every step, " Is this lawful?" The Church has 
other duties apart from the promotion of the secular 
sciences, — duties which may in some degree come 
athwart the immediate interests of these sciences. To 
preserve truth as a whole may mean to arrest for a 
time a one-sided development. Science may, there- 
fore, move faster outside the Church than within it. 

(b) It is quite true that authority acts normally, 
not by way of active assimilation, but mainly by way 
of opposition, to new developments of the reason 
because Authority is the guardian of the deposit of 
faith that is handed down, and it guards it, in the first 
instance, in the traditional form, opposing novelty 
until it is quite clear that the modification of its 
form does not mean real mutilation of its essence. 
Authority opposes the entrance of a new phase of 
intellectual expression until such a new phase is 

3i7 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

shown to be without danger to the faith. It is the 
representatives of the intellectual force in the Church, 
and not those of official authority, who normally 
initiate the work of assimilation. Authority tests it, 
and may in doing so seem to oppose it. She plays, 
so far as scientific proof is concerned, the part taken 
by the " Devil's advocate," in the process of canoni- 
sation. She is jealous of disturbing changes in the 
human medium by which faith in the unseen is habit- 
ually preserved hie et nunc ; science is placed by her 
on the defensive; excesses and fanciful theories are 
gradually driven out of court ; a truer and more 
exact assimilation of assured results in science and 
in theology is thus obtained by the thinkers ; then, 
and not until then, Authority accepts such results 
passively. She is the guardian, not of the truths of 
science, but of the things of the spirit. It is not for 
her to initiate inquiries beyond her special province. 

This division of parts was visible in the great 
theological transformation of the thirteenth century. 
It was not Ecclesiastical Authority, but the great 
University Professors — Albertus Magnus, Thomas 
Aquinas, and their peers — who accomplished the 
work of assimilating Christian Theology to the philo- 
sophical culture of the Aristotelian Renaissance. 
Authority successively opposed, tolerated, and ap- 
proved their labours, as those labours gradually 
Christianised the " new learning " of the thirteenth 
century. Our present need is a body of specialists 
and theologians of insight, who will do a similar 
work for the critical and historical sciences of the 
twentieth century. 

318 



A Church of Rome Approach 

(/) It is, then, not as being the best road, having 
regard solely to the interests of present scientific 
activity, that I advocate the " approach " to the 
desired synthesis (to use the phrase in the Editor's 
Preface) through the Church of Rome, but as being 
the road whereby the security of both interests can 
be best defended. Assuming that Christianity was a 
revelation of spiritual truth, the interests of truth as 
a whole are best guarded by an institution which 
does act to some extent as a drag on the freest 
adoption of speculations advanced in the name of 
science and criticism. An absolutely free admission, 
broadcast, among all minds, of the most various 
calibre, of the highly speculative theories of (more 
especially) modern biblical critics, — theories inspired 
often by anti-Christian prejudice, — need not be 
prejudicial to secular science itself. It may even 
contribute to scientific truth from the gems mixed 
with the rubbish. But it may be opposed to the 
interests of truth, as a whole, hie et nunc. It may 
destroy religious faith in the many. The imagina- 
tion becomes overpowered by the kaleidoscope of 
irresponsible speculation. The faculty whereby re- 
ligious truth is grasped is confused by the over- 
crowding of the mind. Its grasp is relaxed. Faith 
may be killed never to return, and lost like some 
traditional secret in art or in painting, — as the 
tradition of the old Gregorian singing is said to 
have been lost. 

Hence the suspiciousness on the part of the guar- 
dians of dogma of any novelty which affects the 
statement or exposition of dogma. It is no question 

3 J 9 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

of hostility to science as such, but of the jealous 
guardianship of the " deposit." This is no fancy or 
theory. The jealousy of which I speak may bring 
out exhibitions of the persecuting temper in indi- 
viduals ; it may be mixed up with party feelings or 
personal antipathies; it may take the form of ob- 
scurantism : but no one acquainted with Rome can 
deny that there is in the appointed rulers this deep 
traditional sense that it is their business to guard the 
" deposit," and that to fail in this is the one great 
crime compared to which injustice to secular science 
is a small matter, — for it is to fail in the principal 
duty of their office. This may sound not an entirely 
promising defence of Rome as the " approach " to a 
synthesis between religion and science. But I regard 
the method I have sketched as essential if both ele- 
ments are to be preserved. The trend of the modern 
movement is at present inevitably, at least indirectly, 
anti-religious. The wonders of Christianity, the new 
birth of the moral world which we owe to it, have 
become an old story. They cease to inspire and 
hold men as they once did. It is science which now 
brings the charm of new worlds of discovery. A 
scientific synthesis of the Universe which forgets 
religion is the real danger. 

The greater the intellectual displacements which 
are seen to be inevitable, the more essential is it that 
a living organism should preserve that supernatural 
truth which is not, strictly speaking, intellectual, and 
of which a merely intellectual recasting of knowledge 
may take no more account than a complete record 
of the anatomical analysis of the human body takes 

320 



A Church of Rome Approach 

account of the soul. A representative body which 
professes, through good and evil repute, to hold fast 
to the Christian message, to assert it, to defend it 
to the death, is essential if Christianity is to last in 
any true sense in the modern world of ever-changing 
intellectual theories, amid the irregular and uncer- 
tain advances towards scientific conclusions, through 
fanciful and delusive speculation. Such a body does 
not directly aid science in its own domain. That is 
not its object or its business. But it does preserve 
one of the elements in the desired synthesis, which 
without such a body to fight its battles would gradu- 
ally dwindle to nothing and lose its influence. The 
new points of view suggested by men of science are 
doubtless accepted outside the Roman Communion 
more readily than within. But is that to say that 
they are assimilated in them by Christianity? I 
doubt it. The scientific synthesis may assimilate 
elements of Christianity elsewhere. But if Christi- 
anity is to assimilate what is true in science, without 
itself becoming utterly diluted and losing its distinc- 
tive genius amid the inevitable intellectual changes, 
I see no other machinery which will, in the long 
run, accomplish this work, except the organic co- 
operation of defenders of the various truths and 
interests concerned, the machinery for which is to be 
found in the constitution of the Catholic Church. 

The specially rigid attitude, then, of modern Rome 
may be regarded, roughly, as the response and retort, 
of a living vigorous power representing Christianity, 
which assumes a definite policy to counteract a policy 
on the part of what may be called the modern move- 
21 3 21 



Ideals of Science and Faith 

menty which is irreligious as well as scientific. The 
desideratum at present is not to dethrone that power 
represented by the Church, but, as I have already 
suggested, to cultivate vigorous thought and wide 
learning within the Church and among all Christian 
thinkers, lest a necessary practical policy on the part 
of the Church should tend to become identified with 
intellectual intransigeance and sheer opposition to the 
interests of truth in certain departments. The results 
of the scientific movement, as they come to us from 
the hands of opponents of Christianity, the Church 
cannot accept. They are not pure science. What is 
advanced as science is in reality often subtly coloured 
by the prepossessions of its advocates. Only learn- 
ing and thought among Christians themselves, fairly 
equal in extent and quality to those of their oppo- 
nents, can afford the means for the desired synthesis. 
Until these are found, faith may be inevitably allied 
within the Church with a secular science which is 
not fully alive to the problems of the moment. The 
Church which has the patience to wait for these in- 
dispensable allies does not afford, necessarily, the 
quickest " approach " to an acceptance of the modern 
scientific outlook ; but she may prove to afford the 
only machinery whereby the desired syttthesis may 
be attained, — whereby Christianity can be preserved 
undiluted, until Christian thought has accomplished 
the task of finding the necessary modus vivendi and 
rescuing science proper from the hands of those 
assailants of Christianity whose jugglery presents 
the results of their own anti-Christian prepossessions 
as an integral part of scientific achievement. 

322 



A Church of Rome Approach 

And here I terminate my suggestions ; for the actual 
problems, placed by modern science and scientific 
criticism before the thinking world of Christians, do 
not differ very considerably for the Roman Catholic 
and for adherents of the various shades of Protestant- 
ism. My purpose here has been to show that the 
religious approach being the natural preliminary to 
the consideration of scientific criticism, the constitu- 
tion of the Catholic Church, and even its modus agendi 
in the past, are well adapted to the situation. The 
constituent forces concerned in the development of 
its theology exhibit its claim as the guardian of belief 
in the divine revelation, — a belief so constantly as- 
sailed, so easily destroyed for individual minds in the 
confusing Babel of modern speculation, — while pro- 
viding for such assimilation of serious thought and 
science as is consistent with the security of 'Christian 
faith in the weak and impressionable mind of man. 
Whether this assimilation has always been within the 
Church as rapid as it might be consistently with the 
sacred interests to which I refer, is another question. 
But on the assumption that Christianity is all it pro- 
fesses to be, such a deflection from the perfect via 
media, as excessive jealousy for Christian tradition 
implies, would seem to be a less serious charge than 
that of over-great hastiness in reconstruction. 

WILFRID WARD. 



3 2 3 



INDEX 



Abiogenesis, the breakdown of the 
case for, 89 

Africa, a spring in South, 275 ; Cape- 
town electric car, 278 

Agnosticism, decay of, 85 ; religions, 
84; and the Presbyterian Church, 
243; the agnostic tendency, 311 

Alexandrian school, 314 

Alfred, King, setting up schools, 128 

Altruism, 70, 71, 72 

Angelo, Michael, " Art for Art's sake," 
126 

Anthropomorphism, there are many 
errors, but one truth in, 32 

Antoninus, freedom lays in the mind 
itself, 193 

Ants, what know they of fate and of 
the future, 46 

Apologetics and believing, 274 

Aquinas, Thomas, 320 

Aristotle, 172, 184, 224, 267; Aristo- 
telian renaissance, 314, 318 

Arnold, Matthew, in conflict with the 
Dogmatists of religion, 126 

Artistic group, 126 

Atheism, what has been called, 27 

Athenian appetite, 275 

Atomic theory of the universe, 82, 83, 97 

Atoms and an inner principle of adap- 
tation, 89 ; the discussion of, often 
confused, 280 

Augustine, Saint, and Richard Hooker, 
267 

Australia, severance of religious bodies 
from any vital connection with politi- 
cal life, 263 

Authority, the guardian of the "de- 
posit" of faith, 317; authority and 
science, 318 



Bacillic forms sensitive to stimuli 
from their environment, 88 



Bacon, before his time in England, 
227; his work telling at last, 228 

Balfour, A. J., a theological stumbling 
block may be a religious aid, 242 

Bayne, Rev. Ronald, A Church of 
England Approach, 246-268 

Beethoven, what struggle for existence 
will explain the advent of a, 36 

Berkeley, 277 

Bible, the, 14, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 
243; not a scientific text-book, 241; 
history of the power of ideals, 249 ; 
historical character, essential to its 
value, 251; the kingdom of God in, 
252; and the secular sciences, 310 

Biological Approach, Professor J. A. 
Thomson and Professor Patrick 
Geddes, 49-80 

Biology, 20, 35, 52; and education, 
186, 203; evolution, 62, 63, 78; 
human progress, 78; idea of God, 
78 ; theology, 49, 50 ; ideals of, 7^1 
75, 77, 80; ideals of religion, 204 

Boscowich, the atomic theory, 83 

Box-making in modern education, 208 

Brahmin purification, 198 

Bram, the, no real continuity between 
brain processes and mental experi- 
ences, 90 

Branford, Mr. Victor V., A Sociologi- 
cal Approach, 103-156 

British and French educational meth- 
ods, 171 

Brown-Sequard and biological science, 
196 

Browning's " Christmas Eve," 249 

Buchner's " Force and Matter," 8^ 

Buddha and the great spiritual discov- 
ery of the race, 147 

Buff on and evolutionary processes, 135 

Bull, John, educational reawakening, 
188 



325 



Index 



Bulletin pour V Action Morale, 176 
Bunge and biological problems, 55 

Calvin, John, 223, 225, 228, 239, 
263 ; Calvinistic system, 227 

Campbell, John MacLeod and the 
Church of Scotland, 234 

Candlish, Professor J. S., on seven- 
teenth-century theologians, 232 ; on 
principles of the Reformation, 239 

Causation, 100 ; its genesis, 109; scien- 
tific principle of, 109 

Cause and effect, 86, 91 

Cell, the, 19 ; inorganic material and, 
20 ; the living, 89 

Celibacy for the school mistress, 174 

Ceremonial, religious and artistic, 140, 
145 ; ceremonialism, 206 

Ceremonials, functions of, 149 

Chalmers, Thomas, 130, 235 

Chance one of the most orderly phe- 
nomena in the universe! 64 

Charlemagne creating local administra- 
tion, 128 

Chemistry and life, 88 

Chiene, Dr., no antagonism between 
science and religion, 222 

Chillingworth, the extremes of doubt 
and dogma meet, 298 

China and education, 186 

Christian doctrines, 14; doctrine of 
creation, 224; "evidences," 234; 
Church vitalised the European 
nationalities, 260; thought and 
modern science, 312 

Christianity and Biology, 51; and the 
Grseco- Roman civilisation, 255; and 
renunciation, 163; the scientific syn- 
thesis of, 320; no short cut to es- 
sence of, 312. 

Church atmosphere and a scientific man, 
12; and education, 172,203; human 
reason, 313; modern thought, 323; 
Nonconformists, 261; Roman Em- 
pire, 255 ; science, 270, 317 ; schools, 
173; and sociology, 221; mankind 
spiritualised, 302 

Church of England Approach, Rev. 
Ronald Bayne, 246-268 ; the Bible, 
249 ; Puritanism, 258 ; Roman 
Catholic Church, 260 ; Noncon- 
formist Free Churches, 262 ; change 
in the Nonconformist ideal, 263; 
ideal of freedom, 265; its catho- 



licity asserted as a national King- 
dom of Christ, 267; aspires to be 
as strong as English human nature, 
268 
Church of England Approach, Rev. 
Philip Napier Waggett, 269-303; 
parties in the English Church — 
need for recognition of each other's 



honesty, 



suppositions upon 



which faith in the Church rests, 
283; methods of enquiry, 284; be- 
lief in an inward submission of the 



spirit, 



two points of high 



Churchmanship, 286; limits and 
constitution of, 286; four types of 
conviction, 286; the Catholic type, 
288 ; this Catholic type not narrow, 
289 ; the Church may be figured as 
a star in the darkness, 291 ; the 
star has its blazing centre, although 
its light has not circumference line, 
291 ; tolerance of high Churchmen, 
292; the principle "only Church- 
men are Christians," 293; the ap- 
peal to history, 293; the high 
Churchman's position, 294; the law 
of obedience, 295 ; the law of growth, 
295 ; the true method of unity, 298 ; 
scope of dominion, 299; limitation 
of the high Church approach, 300; 
spiritual character of, 301 ; author- 
ity, 302 

Church, Presbyterian Approach, Rev. 
John Kelman, 219-245; relation be- 
tween science and religion, 222, 225 ; 
divines hostile to scientific advance, 
228; divines and liberty of thought, 
231 ; unflinching champion of po- 
litical liberty, 231; School of Rec- 
onciliation, 236; inspiration, 240; 
reconciliation of science and faith, 
244; the newer conception of the 
Bible, 244 ; science and religion 
need no reconciliation, 244; "The 
facts are God's facts," 244; the past 
a controversy of misunderstanding, 
245 

Church of Rome Approach, Mr. Wil- 
frid Ward, 304-323 ; the province 
of science, 304; religion a combi- 
nation of speculation and tradition, 
305; scientific development, 310; 
conclusions of human reason, 313; 
achievements of human reason, 316; 

26 



Index 



translates moral ideas into action, 
314; freedom of human intellect, 
316; scientific advance, 317: guar- 
dian of the things of the spirit, 318 ; 
danger to faith, 318; as the "ap- 
proach " to a synthesis between 
religion and science. 319; preserves 
" deposit " of faith, 320 : its attitude 
defended, 321; materialistic oppon- 
ents, 322; hasty acceptance of sci- 
entific speculation, 323 

Cicero, 267 

Clerical schoolmasters in social science 
ahead of their Positivist antagonists, 
176 

Coe and the altruistic aspect of life, 

7i 

Coleridge, 305 

Comte, 120, 129, 135, 136 

Condorcet on the human mind, 136 

Confucius, 147 

Conservation of energy, 8, 9, 97, 100. 

Continuity, variation as well as con- 
tinuity in living creatures, 59 

Copernicus, 172; Copernican theory 
of mind and matter, 97 

Corot, 126 

Cosmos, self-explanatory, 18 

Covenanters, widened breach between 
science and religion, 229 

Creation, the legend of six days, 13; 
and God, 29, 30; and science, 17; 
Mephistophelean story of, 157 

Credulity and science and religion, 220 

Creed, the, 270 

Cromwell, Oliver, selecting his Parlia- 
ment, 128 

Culture of Existence, 79; ideals of 
pecuniary, 120; deficiency of cul- 
ture resources, 100 ; cultural differ- 
entiation, 103 ; groups, 149 

Cuvier, the type system of, 186 

Darwin, 51, 71, 108, 135, 172, 186, 

237, 242 
Data, a plea for differences of, 274, 

279; data of experience, 305 
Davids, Professor Rhys, 147 
Death and the soul, 13; the spectacle 

of, 166, 168 
Degeneration, spiritual, 151 
Deity, the existence of, 16 
Demolins, M., the expositor of the 

larger influence of Le Play, 176 



Denny, Professor James, and man's 
responsibility for the nature which 
he has inherited, 60 
Descartes, the atomic theory, 82 
Development, the human stage of, 40 
Dewey, Professor, and race experience, 

188 
Diderot, conceptions of idealism, 139, 

140 
Difficulties in religion, 271 
Dionysius the Areopagite, 267 
Diplomacy and sociology, 142 
Disease, diseases, 43; we suffer from 

disease of sameness, 278 
Divine Will, limitation of the, 9 
Dogma, 114; suspiciousness of the 
church to novelty in exposition of, 
298, 319 
Doubt, intellectual, 271 
Doyle, see Conan, quoted, 33 
Drummond, Professor H. and altru- 
ism, 71 ; and evolution, 242 

East, the reconstruction of the ruined, 
216 

Economics and religion, 123 

Educational Approach, Professor P. 
Geddes, 170-207 

Educational Approach, Technical, 
Professor P. Geddes, 207-216 

Education, common ideals, 170; polit- 
ical ideals, 129 ; French schools, 
171; Church schools, 173; English 
Educational Office, 181 ; United 
States, Commissioner of, 180 ; the 
teacher, 192; real essential of, 182 ; 
and Nature, 184 ; biology, 186 ; re- 
awakening in, 18S, 206 ; the synthetic 
view of, 189 ; co-ordination of, 196 ; 
science, 194, 205, 309; Oriental and 
Western, 198; gardening, 208; box 
making, 209 ; payment for school 
and home work, 210 ; Sunday, 213 ; 
parents, 309 

Elizabeth, reign of Queen, the King- 
dom of Christ in England, 261 ; the 
" spacious " age of Elizabeth, 266 ; 
produced the most Catholic-minded 
divine of the English Church, 267 

Emerson, 126 

England, Church of, see Church of 
England Approaches 

Encyclopedists, 223 

Energy, S3, 89 ; the dissipation of, 29 



3 2 7 



Ind 



ex 



Epictetus, freedom lays in the mind 

itself, 193 
Equality, 175 
Erasmus, 126 
Erastianism and Latitudinarianism are 

old allies, 298 
" Essays and Reviews," 15 
Ethical Approach, An, Hon. Bertrand 

Russell, 157-169 
Eucharist, the, 294 
Euclidean system, 98 
Evil, and Christianity, 163 
Evolution, 18, 26, 27, 61, 62, 63, 64, 

205, 242, 243; ethical aspects of 

organic, 68; a materialised ethical 

process, 73; of social groups, 124; 

and Genesis, 237, 311 

Facts of science, God's facts, 242 

Failures, necessary for the race, 39 

Faith, the field of enquiry must be 
mapped, 279 ; faith healing, 197 ; 
presuppositions upon which faith 
in the Church rests, 283 ; the divorce 
of faith from science, 308 ; danger 
to faith from irresponsible specula- 
tion, 314 ; deposit of, 317, 318, 320 ; 
the enquiry of, 279 

Fall, the, of man, 17 ; a perennial 
event, 151 ; the abandonment of 
thought for impulse, 296 

Fate, 163, 165, 168 

Fechner and quantitative equivalence, 
92 

Finance and the Vatican, 131 

Financiering, 119, 120 

Fiske, and altruism, 71 

Flint, Dr., on the war between super- 
stition and reason, 222; "so long 
as men's beliefs as to things were 
regulated not by evidence but by 
authority, there could be no science/ ' 
241 ; the book of Nature, a book of 
revelation, 242, 243 

Force, shall we worbhip, 161 

Formalism, mathematical, 11 1; for- 
malists, 115 

Frederick the Great, working like a 
galley slave, 129 

Freedom, Stoic, 162 ; modern ideal 
of, in a National Church, 266 

French Revolution, 233, 234 

French schools, 175, 176, 177 

Frcebelians, 188 



Galileo, 82, 172, 311 

Galton, Francis, 203 

Gardening and Education, 208 

Geddes, Professor P., A Biological 
Approach, 49-80; An Educational 
Approach, 170-207; A Technical 
Approach, 207-216; on altruism, 
171; and social groups, 105 

Genesis, the book of, 15 ; and evolution, 
237 

Genius and science, 36 

German educational professors, 174 

Gilliatt in " Les Travailleurs de la 
Mer," 302 

Glennie, J. Stuart, 147 

Gnosticism and Catholic theology, 315 

God — and man, 101; does He work 
without agents, 42 ; a scientific, 39; 
how His will done on earth, 255 

Goethe, 126, 157 

Goodness, shall we worship, 161 

Gospels give man new reality of re- 
sponsibility, 253 

Gravitation, the law of, 17 

Guidance, theology vaguely assumes, 
science sees it not at all, 36, 37 

Haeckel, the protogenes of, 84 

Haldane, Dr. J. S., the vitalistic posi- 
tion, 55 

Hand, Rev. J. E., Preface and Intro- 
duction 

Harnack on Catholic Theology and 
Gnosticism, 315 

Harvey and the circulation of the blood, 

53 
Heathen types, 152 
Hegel, definition of philosophy, 97; an 

idealist of the historical group, 135 
Hellenism of the Gnostics, 315 
Herder and evolutionary processes, 

x 35 

Heredity, the doctrine of, 58 

High Churchmanship, what it stands 
for, 286 

History, ideals of, 135 ; statisticians, 
132; historical formalists, 132 ; ideal- 
ists, 135; historians, types of, 132 

Hobbes,86, 298 _ 

Hokusai and artistic education, 209 

Holiness as ideal synthesis, 154 

Holland, Mrs. Mary Sibylla and the 
Belief, 270 

Home work, payment for, 210 

28 



Index 



Hooker, 108 ; the most Catholic-minded 
divine of the English Church, 267 

Hugh of Saint Victor, 267 

Hutchinsonians, 240 

Huxley, 13, 69, 186, and Hugh Miller, 
236, 237 

Ideal school of educational art, 192, 
of organised culture, 190 

Ideals, biology, 74, 77 ; of pecuniary 
culture, 120; education, 170; of the 
East, 199; history, 135; industry, 
107, 121 ; perfection, 161 ; the power 
of, 249; necessary to the race, 251 ; 
religion, 154, 204, 246; science, 77 \ 
107, no, 150, 246, 301; social, 148; 
men of science, 247; modern ideal 
of freedom in a national Church, 
266 ; moral, and Church of Rome, 314 

Idealism, Spinoza's, 140; religious gen- 
esis of, 147; in the universities, 152; 
common interests of, 152; practical 
policy of, 154; the insight of crea- 
tive, 165 

Idealistic social alliances, 152 

Idealists and formalists, 115; literary, 
126; political, 128; philosophical, 
138 

Idolatry, in politics, 128; of scientists, 

Incommensurate realities, 269 

India, realisation of the good, 197 

Industrial types, 121; industry and 
science, 107 

Inheritance, variation as well as con- 
tinuity in, 59 

Inorganic material and life, 20; pro- 
cesses, 56 

Inquisition, tales of the wickedness of 
the, 264 

Intelligence not wholly inaccessible, 
and yet not familiarly accessible, 38 

Introduction, editor's, general purpose 
of volume 

Irenaeus, Saint, 314 

Israelites, the creed of the old, and Mr. 
Huxley, 13 

James, Henry, his person of experi- 
ence, 278 

James, Professor W., and measure- 
ment, 92; bankruptcy of Natural 
Theology, 68 ; Christian Science, 
197; ''Talks to Teachers," 188 



Japan, her world pre-eminent recogni- 
tion of the Good, 199 

Jefferson striving to unite political phil- 
osophy with practical administra- 
tion, 129 

Jesuit schools, 178 

Jesus Christ and suffering, 32 ; to the 
Lord that we pray, 42 ; rustic la- 
bour, 216; the perfect King, and 
also the perfect people, 253; the 
mastery of, 284; God manifest in 
the flesh, 299; the Church the end 
of our Lord's ministry, 288 

Jew, the, and the Kingdom of God, 
264 

Job, God's answer to, 160 

John, Saint, quoted, 275 

Jurisprudence, a methodological con- 
vention of, 127 

Kant, 135, 251, 277 

Kelvin, an example of cultural differ- 
entiation, 108 

Kingdom of Christ, and the Roman 
Empire, 255-259; the Gospel of 
the, 253; tendencies to limit the 
scope of, 258 ; in England, 261 ; not 
desired as a concrete reality, 264 

Kipling, Rudyard, " McAndrew's 
Hymn," 226 ; Kim, 307 

Known and Unknown, 197 

Knox, John, on Church government, 
227, 228 

Kropotkin on altruism, 71 

Labour, division of, 191 

Laotse, 147 

Latitudinarians, 228, 298 

Lavoisier, an example of cultural dif- 
ferentiation, 108 

Law, the law of human life, 98 ; natu- 
ral law, 86; the reign of, 25, 35 

Lawyers, political formalists, 127 

Lecky on Presbyterian persecutions, 
231 

Leibnitz, 139 

Leisure vicarious, 119 

Leonardo, 126, 209 

Liberty, 166, 175 

Life, 19, 21, 54, 60, 84, %%\ and biol- 
ogy? 5 2 5 an< i science, 19; physico- 
chemical theories of, 57 

Lindsay, Professor T. M., on pagan 
science, 224 



3 2 9 



Index 



Linnaeus, 108, 172 

Lister and developments of healing, 
198 

Literary idealists and formalists, 126 

Lodge, Sir Oliver, A Physicist's Ap- 
proach, 1-48 

Logical formalism, 111 

Love and hate, 70; golden light of 
love, 168 

Lowe, Robert, and payment by results, 
177 

Luther, 226, 239, 263 

Magic, in relation to religion and na- 
ture, 197,200; survivals of, 149 

Magn us Albertus, 314 

Mallock on science and religion, 221 

Man and the universe, 46, 67, 82; and 
God, 101; his origin, 17; product 
of the evolutionary process, 66 ; The 
Free Man's Worship, 157; his as- 
pirations and ideals, 159, 162, 189; 
his impotence before the powers of 
nature, 159; and the forces of na- 
ture, 167; does not live by reason 
alone, 307; his antiquity, 311 

Man, antiquity of, 311 

Marner, Silas, casting lots, 306 

Martineau, Dr., on science and religion, 
221 

Materialism, 244, 250 ; theory of the 
universe, 87; dogmatic, 281; and 
the reality of the spirit, 284 

Mathematical conceptions, 98 ; formal- 
ism, in 

Matter, 26, 84, 97 

Maynard, Miss, ideals of civilisation, 
culture and philanthropy, 220 

Measurement and physical explana- 
tion, 91 

Mechanical theory, 53; philosophers, 
92 

Medical science, Western, 198 

Melancthon, 126 

Mental states have a quantitative as- 
pect, 92 

Metaphysical and physical enquiries 
must be kept distinct, 280; but 
neither are to be suppressed, 282 

Metchnikoff, 196 

Method of divine government, 21 

Methodological convention, 110; meth- 
odology of non-scientific groups, 114 

Metternich, 177 



Miller, Hugh, and the schoolof Recon- 
ciliation, 244 

Mill, J. S., 86, 130 

Militarism, the creed of, 162 

Mind, the, 93, 95, 97 ; as an adjunct 
of the brain, 90 

Miracles, 16, 244 

Missionary, work and broadening of 
the theological outlook, 234 ; the 
Irish Missionaries, 302 

Modern specialism, 191 

Moral ideals and the Church of Rome, 
3 J 4 

Morley, John, on the great Puritan 
chiefs, 231 

Moses, 184, 236; purifications of, 198 

Muirhead, Professor John H., A Psy- 
chological Approach, 81-102 

Munsterberg, Professor, and mechan- 
ics of mind, 93 

Myth, survivals of, 149 

National Church, 261, 263, 266, 
268 

Nature, Uniformity of, 25; adapta- 
tion of the forces of, 45 ; the book 
of, 242; the continuity of, 84 ; unity 
of, 84; laws of, 99; man's impotence 
before the power of, 159; the forces 
of, 167; and education, 184; the 
mastery of, 216; the strategy of, 
70; natural laws, 86; " Naturphilos- 
ophie," 1 88; naturalistic explana- 
tion of the universe, 88 ; the normal 
course of, 308; church follows the 
path of, 314; the book of Nature 
the text-book of divine revelation, 
242 

Newman, Cardinal, 305, 315 

New Testament, see Bible 

Newton, 33, 228, 240 

Nietzsche and worship of force, 161 

Nonconformity, 262; non-conformist 
ideal changes in the conception of 
Christ's kingdom, 263; the sin of 
leaving the national Church, 264; 
Non-conformity and the national 
Church, 265, 266 

Obscurantists, 274 

Occupations, honorific and humilific, 

118 
Okakura, " Ideals of the East," 198 
Oken, the teachings of, 188 



330 



Index 



Opposition of fact and ideal, 162 
Organic development, 313 
Origin, the subtleties of, 239 
Owen, Robert, and idealism, 130 

Pain, the endurance of, 166 

Pantheism, different kinds of, 31 

Parents and education, 309 

Parker, Colonel, the training of 
teachers, 188 

Past, the magical past does not change, 
167 

Pasteur, 108, 196, 198 

Paul, Saint, quoted, 275 

Pearson, Karl, whether life is mechan- 
ism, 56; a naturalist of all special- 
isms, 203 

Pestalozzi and education, 188 

Philo Judaeus, 267 

Philosophy, 6, 85, 100, 137, 138, 139, 
247, 314; and the Christian Church, 
315; no fresh thought received as 
such, 277 

Physical interference, 41 ; causa- 
tion and conceptions, 86, 91 ; meta- 
physical enquiries must be kept 
distinct, 2S0; but not suppressed, 
282 

Physicist's Approach, A, Sir Oliver 
Lodge, 1-48 

Planets, bodily existence on other 
planets is probable, 38 

Plato, his philosophic revelation, the 
triad of good and beautiful and true, 
199 

Pliny the younger, the political ideal 
on its negative side, 130 

Poetry, a reconciling element to reli- 
gion, 6 

Policeman, a political formalist, 127 

Political types and ideals, 126, 129; 
politics and religion, 131; politics 
and natural selection, 127 

Power, submission to power, the gate 
of wisdom, 164 

Prayer, 8, 13, 21, 35, 40, 43, 44, 47, 
244; Prayerbook, 299 

Preface, Rev. J. E. Hand 

Presbyterian Approach, A., Rev. John 
Kelman, 219-245 

Presbyterian Church, see Church 
Presbyterian 

Priest, priestcraft, and religion, 104; 
and women, 131; priestly types, 



143; primary religious revolution, 

149 
Protoplasm, 19, 20, 53 
Psychic Lift of the Race, the Great, 

H7 

Psychological Approach, A, Professor 

John H. Muirhead, 81-102 
Psychology, 85, 89, 10 1, and religion, 

93. i QI 
Ptolomy obscurantism in science, 172 
Puritanism, Sir Walter Scott on, 230; 

tendencies to limit the Kingdom of 

God, 258; Ruskin on, 259 

Quality of Race to-morrow, 201 
Quantity of Empire to-day, 201 

Race, the Great Psychic Lift of the 
Race achieved by the Priesthood, 

H7 

Rain and prayer, 8 

Rainy, Principal, on Presbyterian lib- 
erty of thought, 230 

Reason, human, and the Church of 
Rome, 316 

Receptive, let us be more, 279 

Reconciliation of Science and Reli- 
gion, Sir Oliver Lodge, 24-48 

Redemption and Science, 151 

Reformation, period of the, 226, 232, 
244, 259 

Religion and Science, the Outstand- 
ing Controversy, Sir Oliver Lodge, 
2-23 

Religion and the Census Reports, 104 ; 
economics, 123 ; philosophy, 1, 39 ; 
politics, 131 ; priestcraft, 104 ; psy- 
chology, 93, 101 ; stronger to-day 
than any period since Reformation, 
85 ; the conflict with science, 81, 
123, 244 ; and secular sciences, 308 ; 
sociology, 143 ; Spinoza, 140 ; of 
snobbery, 148; a combination of 
speculation and tradition, 305 ; a 
scientific religious creed impossible, 
306; difficulties in, 271 

Religions, a civil war of, 264 

Religious ceremonial, 144, 145, 146, 
149 ; belief, the faculty may be lost, 
309 ; idealism, 147 ; opposition to 
riches, 122 ; and scientific aims con- 
trasted, 12 ; revolution, the primary, 
148 

Renaissance, the sound side of, 267 



3S 1 



Index 



Responsibility, Is a man responsible 
for the nature which he has in- 
herited ? 60 

Restoration, period of the, 230 

Romance, 201 

Roman Empire, the Kingdom of 
Christ and the, 255, 259 

Romanes, and nature, 63 

Rome, Church of, see Church 

Rome, Church of Approach, Mr. 
Wilfrid Ward, 304-323 

Roux and biological science, 196 

Royce, on natural selection, 101 

Ruskin, 57, 73, 259 

Russell, Hon. Bertrand Russell, An 
Ethical Approach, 157-169 

Sahara, the reclamation of the, 215 

Saints and seers, distrust of the quest 
for cold hard truth, 5 ; there is more 
nearly an orthodox science than 
there is an orthodox theology, 4; 
the outline of modern science 
known, 5 

Schleiermacher's renovation of the- 
ology, 141 

Schools, 173; French school, 171; 
English Church, 282 

Science, and creation, 17; Christian 
thought, 312; and faith, 1-22; an- 
tagonism between science and faith, 
24, 308, 312; and the Bible, 310; 
redemption, 151; religion, 81, 207, 
219, 220, 241, 244, 306; theology, 
4, 312; religion in the Presbyterian 
Church, 222 ; the true province of, 
305; corrects illusions, 305; the 
Church, 270, 317; education, 194, 
2o 5> 3°95 industry, 107; sociology, 
114 ; defects of modern science, 112; 
dogma of modern science, 114; 
Christian science and Professor 
James, 197; ideals of, yy, 154, 301; 
dissects more than it constructs, 
76 

Scientific atmosphere and a religious 
man, 12; scientific development and 
the Church of Rome, 310, 320; the 
Presbyterian Church, 244; scien- 
tific man and the Bible, 251 ; meth- 
ods, 112; a scientific synthesis, 319, 
321; scientists, types of, 114 

Scott, Sir Walter, on the Covenanters, 
229 



Sectarianism less marked in science 
than theology, 5 

Selection, 36 

Sense of things, elemental, Editor's 
Introduction 

Servetus, 225 

Shakespeare's breadth of sympathy in 
his plays, 268 

Shaw, Bernard, 202 

Sins, failures, mistakes, — yes, they ex- 
ist; evolution would be meaningless 
if perfection were already attained, 39 

Smith, Adam, 108, 235 

Smith, Robertson, 185 

Social alliances, ideal, 152 

Social groups, evolution of, 124 

Social groups, 105 

Social ideals, genesis of, 125, 148 

Social studies, the renewal of, 187 

Sociological Approach, A, Mr. V. V. 
Branford, 103-156; group and com- 
munitary interests, 105; society, 156 

Sociology and diplomacy, 142; and 
religion, 143, 204,235; science, 114; 
the Church, 221; the birth of, in 
1776, 235 

Socrates, his communion with the all- 
pervading mystery of the universe, 

138 

Soul, the idea of soul as substance, 
90; not intruded into the unity of 
the heritage, 59 ; and the outer 
world, 167; God's relationship to 
it, 284 

Spencer, Herbert, 70, 120, 135, 138, 
172, 186 

Spinoza, his declaration that religious 
ideals must expand with the growth 
of knowledge, 139, 141; service to 
religion, 140 

Spiritual degeneration, 151; matters, 
our faculty for receiving new truth 
is blunted, 274, 279 

State schools, 172 

Statistics and history, 132 

Stoic freedom in which wisdom con- 
sists, 162 

Stokes, Sir G. G., the mathematical 
power and knowledge of, 33 

Stout, Professor, and the external 
world, 96 

Struggle for existence, 72 

Stylists, the, manifest as Formalists, 
126 



332 



Ind 



ex 



Suffering of Jesus Christ, 32; by suf- 
fering Christ's Kingdom is spread, 
263; by suffering that we conquer, 
266 

" Suggestive," the abuse of the word, 
276 

Sunday and freedom from week-day 
lessons, 214 

Superstition, 197, 316 

Symbolism, an ever renascent, 206 

Sympathy, to lighten sorrow by, 168 

Technical Approach, A, Professor 
Patrick Geddes, 207-216 

Temporal and spiritual power, 132; 
differences of opinion on important 
issues, 4; not yet had its Newton, 

34 
Theological renascence, the nineteenth 

century, 141 
Theology and biology, 49, 50, 52, 74; 

and evolution, 62, 63; science, 312; 

Schleiermacher's renovation of, 141 ; 

scholastic, 223 
Thomas, Saint, and Richard Hooper, 

267 
Thomson, Professor J. Arthur, A Bio- 
logical Approach, 49-80 
Time, the purifying fire of, 168 
Titian and technical education, 209 
Toleration, its moral value, 263 
Trajan, his political ideal stated to 

Pliny, 130 
Truth, our faculty for receiving is 

blunted, 274 
Turgot and political idealism, 130 
Tyndall on disturbance of natural law, 

8 ; address to British Association in 

1874 quoted, 84; a believer in the 

ultimate reducibility of mental to 

atomic changes, 91 

Unification of religious scientific 
ideals, 154 

United States Commissioners of Edu- 
cation, 180 

Universe, 11, 17, 21, 23, 26, 29, 46, 
82, 87 ; a scientific synthesis which 
forgets religion, the real danger, 320 



Universities and idealism, 152 

Variation as well as continuity in in- 
heritance, 59 

Vatican, the, its finances in sound or- 
der, 131 

Veblin, Thorstein, the psychological 
types classified by, 120 

Vicarious leisure, 119 

Vico, an idealist of the historical group, 

135 
Vitalism, 53, 55 
Volition, the doctrine of, 94 
Voltaire and the " Illumination " in 

France, 232 
Von Baer, the embryology of, 186 



Waggett, Rev. P. N., The Church 

as Seen from Outside, 269-303 
Wagner, 126 
Wallace, A. R., and man's highest 

qualities, 67 
Ward, Mr. Wilfrid, A Church of Rome 

Approach, 304-323 
Waste, conspicuous, 119 
Waves, 18; experiments on, 34 
Welby, V. Lady, Editor's Introduction 
Wells, Mr. H. G., 137, 202, 247 
Weltanschauung, 304 
White, Gilbert, found Nature in his 

garden, 184 
Wind, the Italian, and natural law, 8 ; 

and blaze of sun, 18 
Witchcraft in Scotland, 228 
Women and priests, 131 
Wordsworth and physical phenomena, 

101 
World, an alien and inhuman, 159; the 

external, 96; may be more than 

lumps and shakes, 279 
Worship only the God created by our 

own love of the good, 162 

Zola sees nearer facts of life than poli- 
tician, 202 

Zoroaster, his constructive intensity, 
215 



333 



JUN 11 1904 



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